The hairline seam behind Luma’s cracked core did not run straight like a mason’s joint. It wandered through the limestone in a faint, meandering track, no wider than the blade of Tessa’s bread knife, following the natural bedding planes of the rock where groundwater had seeped for centuries.
Noll Vey lowered the focus of his Bastion awareness until he could count the tiny quartz crystals lining the split. Through the stone, he perceived something that made his phantom pulse quicken. Along the inner edge of the fissure, pressed into a thin layer of damp clay that had dried forty winters ago, were dozens of small indentations.
They were handprints.
The largest belonged to a girl of ten or eleven, her slender fingers spread wide against the shale. The smallest was hardly bigger than a walnut shell—the chubby, five-fingered stamp of a child barely old enough to walk without stumbling over her own smock. They ran in a continuous trail along the hidden bedding plane, leading deeper into the margin where the bedrock seemed to fold inward upon itself.
“Bring the horn lantern closer, Tessa,” Noll said, his voice humming softly through the rock ceiling.
Tessa knelt in the wet silt, holding the yellow lantern against the rock face until the light struck the crevice at an angle. She leaned in until her forehead nearly brushed the rough granite.
