The titanium blade whistled through the dark.
Julian did not try to block it. He could not parry a four-foot axe three hundred feet above the rocks. Instead, he shoved his hips violently to the right, letting his boots slide six inches down the galvanized riser.
CLANG!
The double-edged axe struck the structural angle iron where Julian’s shoulder had been half a second earlier. A spray of cold blue sparks showered across Julian’s goggles. The titanium edge gouged a two-inch silver scar into the steel, buzzing with high-voltage resonance.
“Hold still, clerk,” the lead rigger barked through his helmet speaker.
The man’s voice was muffled by his storm suit, flat and distorted like a drive-through speaker. Behind the mirrored welding visor, his eyes were invisible. He hung in his heavy braided nylon harness, suspended six feet out from the ladder column, swaying effortlessly in the fifty-five-knot wind.
His partner, Rigger Two, swung around the exterior corner strut. He hung from a twin rappel line, his insulated boots kicking against the lattice to maintain tension.
In Rigger Two’s left hand was a pair of pneumatic cable-shears. The jaws were pointed directly at the thin, olive-drab field wire trailing from Julian’s harness down the central pipe.
