For three silent breaths, the only sound in the dim red service hall outside the inner vault was the deep, four-second rhythmic thrum of the six-inch bronze floor-guide-rod passing beneath the closed bronze doors. The sound of a mountain leaning its weight onto the chests of twelve trapped youths arranged around the central pillar inside.
Seyun slid the longest copper needle back into its leather roll. He tucked the case carefully inside his wool vest beside the Account Book. Then he rose to his feet on the green White Heron jade curb directly before the heavy bronze door of the inner vault.
“How long does it take to manually guide a tester’s breath across the front of the chest bone and teach the vessel to hold its own return, Seyun?” nineteen-year-old Mina asked quietly, slipping her horn listening-tube into her apron pocket and keeping her voice pitched below the hum of the threshold rail. “If we open this bronze door and work together—your Answering Spirit vein reading the unfinished gap in their ribs and my hands steadying the around the heart pulse with warm reed-ash and needles—can we unhook all twelve of them before the unloading bay’s lamps relight?”
Seyun looked at the twelve brass monitoring pins on the junction block. At the five flat return gauges where Senn, Halin, and three other youths were hanging by a thread, and at the seven stronger gauges where Maren and the newer captives were bearing the brunt of the central pillar’s load.
