The affliction did not arrive through tainted water or spoiled grain. It was carried in the frozen marrow of those who had fled the high outer arks.
On the seventh morning after the closing of the gates, an icy lethargy dropped upon the third terrace of Entry hall 034. Over four thousand refugees—primarily elderly fishermen and child-weavers who had survived the open-deck voyage through the stratosphere mists—awoke with skin turned the dull grey of wet slate. Their fingertips were hard as river pebbles, ringing with a brittle, crystal-clear sound when tapped against the marble floor. Their breath was shallow, exhaling faint puffs of white frost even though the stone beneath their mats was warm.
The clan healers were helpless. They applied hot stones and mustard plasters, but the heat merely scorched the surface skin while the cold remained locked deep within the bones. Two young apprentices from the net-makers had already lost feeling in their feet, their toes turning chalk-white as the micro-tiny blood vessels collapsed.
Yan Zhiqiu summoned Qiao Ming from the drainage drain pits of Entry hall 038. When he entered the vast arched hall of the thirty-fourth entry hall, he found hundreds of families weeping softly over their shivering kin. The air in the hall carried a faint, unnatural scent—not the odor of rot, but the sharp, metal tang of deep-space frost, the negative air-pressure chill that leaks from the void when the sky sphere fractures.
