The kitchen dormitory smelled of boiled turnips, burnt pine needles, and the hot, dry stench of pulverized mortar.
Through the fog of lime dust, Noll’s stone boots skidded on the greasy flags. In his chest cavity, nestled behind two inches of dressed river limestone, Core Chip Number Two hummed with a taut, high-pitched vibration. It felt like holding a vibrating lute string between two molars. The Dominion ring was pulling at him from three miles away—the valley water pipes trembling under the artillery shockwaves, the coal-miners shouting in the lower drift, the deep limestone ribs of the hill groaning as each mortar shell tore into the upper scarp.
“Sen!” Noll shouted, his artificial throat scraping like gravel in an iron chute. “Get away from the flue!”
The girl did not run.
She was kneeling on the hearthstones, her worn leather shoes buried in soot and shattered brick. Her linen apron—bleached pale by ten thousand washings in the cistern stream—was hitched up into a deep, double-folded pocket held tight against her ribs by her left elbow. In her right hand she gripped a bent kitchen butter knife, stabbing the rounded blade again and again into the crumbling lime joint between two soot-blackened chimney bricks.
