Walking down a hill had never required engineering calculations when Noll Vey owned knees made of gristle and bad habits.
In those days, a man descending a frosted cart track at six in the morning merely tucked his chin into his collar, trusted his heels to find the ruts, and let gravity do the work while he rehearsed whatever explanation he intended to offer the innkeeper at the bottom. Inside three hundred and forty pounds of quarried grey limestone, however, gravity was not an ally. Gravity was a bailiff with a crowbar waiting for one poorly balanced ankle to tip the whole enterprise into the ditch.
Left heel, Noll instructed the mortar joints below his knee. Wait for the gravel to stop sliding. Set the sole flat. Now bring the right hip forward before the coat-hem catches the frost.
His right boot came down with a dull, grinding thud that crushed white ice into powder. Inside the hollowed recess behind his stone ribs, Core Chip #2—the pale blue facet wedged into the mortar of his chest cavity to tether his sight and voice to this awkward shell—hummed against its copper wire seat like a tuning fork in a cellar. Through that single chip, the world arrived not as the wide, damp panorama of his fort rooms, nor as the warm itch of human skin, rather as blunt pressures and sharp vibrations. He felt the pitch of the grade through his flat soles and the valley wind scraping across the crooked…
