Julian Vance’s work shoes crunched into a two-inch layer of frozen quicklime and shattered safety glass as he stepped off the platform of Car Three.
The cold hit him like an open freezer in an abandoned butcher shop. His breath formed thick, white plumes that hung motionless in the dry air before settling as frost on the dark wool of his clerk lapels.
Behind him, Marcus Cole swung down from the vestibule steps, carrying the Brass Dwarf-Signal Lantern in his right hand. The lantern’s four thick glass lenses cast crisp, lunar-white beams that sliced through the grey dust clouds hanging over the ruined blast doors. The brass body of the lantern hummed with a low, warm vibration that kept Mac’s prosthetic wrist from seizing in the sub-zero chill.
“Watch your step, crew,” Mac said, his voice dropping to a low, gravelly rasp that sounded like iron scrap tumbling down a chute. “The ballast ends right here. It’s marble from here on in, slicker than greased lard on a slaughterhouse floor.”
Elena Rostov and Lin Mei guided Clara’s transport cot down the aluminum folding ramp they had unlatched from the car vestibule. The small rubber wheels rattled across the pulverized threshold where Silt’s buffer-stop had stood five minutes earlier. Elena kept her left hand clamped onto Clara’s radial pulse, her dark eyes darting from side to side as she scanned the perimeter.
