The stone beneath Qiao Ming’s bare feet was three degrees above freezing, slick with the cold sweat of sixty deep-water lengths of overhead ocean. But where the silver ink touched the pale limestone, the seam hissed with violent, chemical heat.
He ran at a steady, measured lope—neither a wild sprint that would waste his breath nor a cautious walk that would allow the resin to cool in the bone ladle. His knees remained slightly bent, lowering his balance point. At the same time, his wide, calloused toes gripped the wet flags like prehensile fingers, reading the micro-fractures in the stone floor and adjusting his stride with every step. For two decades, those feet had known every irregularity in the stone, every threshold worn down by seasonal tides. Every joint where the pre-flood master builders had left spreading gaps to absorb earth-shaking settling.
Behind his right hip, the heavy bone ladle trailed across the stone.
The tip of the ox-bone scoop had been ground flat, exactly four inches wide, with a tuned groove cut into its trailing edge that metered the flow of the silver slurry. From the copper kettle slung across his chest by a harness of greased bridle leather, a flexible drain tube of cured sea-silk fed a nonstop stream of the boiling mixture into the ladle’s bowl.
