The crack in the dark rock floor was no wider than a land-mapper’s thumb, but it breathed like the mouth of a living forge.
In the center of Entry hall 832, along the narrow spine of the Central Prong, the fiery pavers had parted along a transverse rock layer seam. From the fissure rose a thin, nonstop jet of pale white vapor that smelled richly of wet foam-stone, clean rainwater, and the faintest trace of fiery sulfur.
Where the vapor met the freezing air of the Glacial Nave, it didn’t produce an explosion of frost. The speed of the exhaust was enough to create a tiny bell of humid warmth three paces across, within which the heat hovered at a comfortable eighteen degrees above freezing. Around the margin of this warm haven, the starlight ice had melted and refrozen into a scalloped rim of clear, fluted glass that sparkled like a ring of diamonds under the glow of their lantern.
Qiao Ming dropped his pack upon the dry dark rock flags.
He didn’t hesitate. He knelt beside the fissure, extended his bare hands into the warm steam, and let the humid vapor wash over his weathered wrists and calloused fingers. His knuckles, which had begun to whiten at the joints from the biting draft of the open plain, flushed with immediate, tingling warmth.
