The iron railing at the stern was forty inches high, forged from three-inch pipe, and coated with salt-rime.
Yan Zhiqiu stood with the hollow of her back pressed against the top rail. Behind her, three thousand feet of empty, misty air plummeted into the drowned deep pit of Entry hall 400. Ahead of her, across the shattered, smoking timbers of the flight deck, forty paces of open apron separated her from the iron superstructure of the ship.
She could go no further.
Her left arm remained clamped across her chest, cradling the fifteen-pound canvas-wrapped celadon urn. The cold fine china pressed into the bleeding furrow across her ribs, numbing the exposed muscle with its cool, potion-made weight. From the puncture wound in her right calf, blood trickled steadily down her ankle, pooling between her bare toes before spilling over the edge of the scupper into the deep gap.
Her breath came in short, shallow rasps that whistled through her teeth. Her vision was fraying at the edges, gray static buzzing in her ears as body tiredness and blood loss drained the warmth from her limbs.
Yet her feet did not tremble.
Her bare soles, hardened by thirty years of mountain passes and coastal reefs, gripped the wet teak planking with total, gut-deep certainty. She had found the seam between two oak deck-beams. Her toes curled into the grain, locking her skeletal frame to the ship’s main lengthwise truss.
