The window of ringing slack that Halin had opened by speaking his sister’s name in his own cracking, un-measured voice lasted less than a single human heartbeat.
Inside the base of the three-foot central floor needle, the inverted dead-man’s relays were already clicking wildly to rebuild the ninety-beat carrier wave and clamp the silver cuff back down around the boy’s wrist blood vessel before the circuit could part.
Had a martial fighter reached across the chalk boundary with Bronze-charged fingers to yank the cuff loose during that brief hitch, the chamber’s floor wires would have read the cultivated aura and triggered the base collar’s inverted discharge anyway.
Instead, the hands that crossed the white chalk line belonged to nineteen-year-old Mina.
She had no Iron breath in her wrists and no Bronze focus in her elbows. What she had was four winters of assisting her father in the Red Ford clinic, thirty nights of practicing blind needle extractions on willow bark by animal fat-candlelight. The bone metal tongs her father had carved for her from seasoned ox-thigh bone so they wouldn’t conduct a single spark of Heaven’s Measure.
Kneeling on the outer slate ring with Daro Kesh’s boots planted two paces behind her back and Seyun’s shoulder propping Halin upright inside the circle, Mina slid the lower jaw of the bone metal tongs beneath the spring-catch of the silver wrist cuff and clamped the upper jaw onto the flanged collar of the three-inch main restraint needle.
