The rain had ceased by midday, replaced by a cold, greasy harbor fog that smelled of low tide, rotting bladder-wrack. The sour coal smoke that drifted down from the iron foundries on the western canal.
Pella Rook and Eren Tal walked along the narrow cobblestones of Fish Street. Their eyes were locked on the ground between their boots. Eren carried a thirty-foot land-mapper’s chain of tarnished brass links looped over his shoulder and a heavy cast-iron sounding line weight tucked into his leather pocket. Pella held her small wooden drawing board, its surface covered by a fresh sheet of grid paper ruled into half-inch squares.
Every fifteen paces, Eren stopped. He didn’t look at the leaning timber houses or the scowling dock wagon drivers leaning against their wagon wheels. He knelt in the gutter, unrolled five links of the brass chain, and laid his bare palm flat against the granite paving stones.
“Here,” Eren muttered, his voice muffled by the collar of his wool coat. “Feel this one.”
Pella knelt beside him. She took off her woolen fingerless mitten and pressed her palm against the grey cobblestone.
The stone was not cold with the autumn damp. It was warm—dry, feverish, and shaking with a faint, rhythmic shudder that pulsed through the marrow of her wrist bones. The mortar in the joints around the stone had dried to a fine, chalky powder, and in the narrow crevices between the cobbles, the common chickweed and dandelion shoots that usually thrived in the…
