Kaelen rolled the seal-skin parchment with a smooth flick of his wrist.
He slid the architectural blueprint into his leather tube, leaving Claire Vance’s grease-stained recipe book open on the basalt slab.
Twenty minutes had slipped past while Linnea and Elder Sterling calibrated the secondary monitoring needles on the console walkway.
During that time, Kaelen had remained seated on a low wooden bench near the thermal vent, letting the subterranean heat seep into his shins.
His Fallow Slate timers sat poised at eight hundred and twenty hours on Track 1 and Track 3, with one hundred hours on Track 2, while Track 4 had just reset after decoding the blueprint. All four had been held during those twenty minutes of calibration.
Sitting on a hard wooden bench without a pillow is cruel and unusual punishment.
If this family rescue requires another three days of drafting array calculations, I am charging the Vance ancestral treasury eighty silver pieces an hour for consultation fees.
My lower back has rights.
