Under the tented shelter of Seyun’s gray cloak, Mina wrote on the oiled parchment with the crisp, unblotted strokes of an Oran guild clerk recording a high-risk apothecary compound. She didn’t include a single word of political appeal, nor did she ask Vaska Ren for clemency.
In the top column, she logged Senn’s baseline neck-artery and outward pulse counts at rest, the exact beat on which the fourth-between-rib return vessel locked in cold air. The volume of pleural rebound observed on the second breath. Below that, she drew the modified half-beat chest muscle pause that had succeeded on the first cycle, specifying that when Senn was reconnected to the summit pillar, the downward pressure had to be capped at one-third of standard check weight.
If the attendants restored the full common test needle or forced standard cycle depth, she wrote plainly, the hardened ridge between the fourth and fifth ribs would shear the vessel wall within a week. She finished the medical columns. Then, she slid the oiled sheet three inches across the knee-board toward Seyun and handed him the brush.
Seyun steadied his split right palm against his left wrist so the brush tip wouldn’t waver in the cold. In the bottom margin of Mina’s prescription, he added a concise two-line technical diagram showing the sixty-degree three-sided spacing of the three copper needles he had driven into the pillar’s base stone before the escape.
