By the third day, fine steel shavings covered the floor around the table. Heat from the earth veins made the stone warm. Sulfur came in under the door with the smell of fat frying in the passage. The flue kept the air in Cell 114 dry.
Pei Jing leaned over the vise. A piece of roofing iron shielded the lamp from the draft. Under the yellow flame, a thin curl of metal peeled away from the needle.
Then his third finger shook. The awl jumped a hair’s breadth at stroke thirty-six and cut through the wall between two lines.
Pei Jing stopped. He laid the point on the cloth, loosened the vise, and held the needle to the lamp. The break showed through the lens. He dropped it into the clay bowl.
It joined seven other ruined blanks.
He set them out in a row. One had slag inside it. A few had cuts too deep to leave the steel strong. Oil he’d missed made the bile draw up in beads on another. He’d taken a breath at the wrong time on one, and fatigue had pulled his wrist sideways on the next. He wrote a short note beside each one.
