The morning light of Day 1 always struck the pine floorboards at the exact same angle.
It came through the four small panes of the east window in the upper bedroom of the River Lantern—a cold, watery beam of early winter dawn that cut through the dust motes and illuminated the knots in the second floorboard from the washstand. On the plaster wall beside the doorway, the shadow of the leafless pear tree in the back garden danced in the mountain wind, its crooked branches tapping against the cedar shingles with a soft, familiar rhythm.
Jon Hale opened his eyes.
He did not gasp. He did not lurch upright in the bed. In eight previous returns, he had learned that the human heart was an fragile instrument that could easily burst if a man tried to carry the terror of an execution into the quiet stillness of dawn. He lay flat on the straw mattress, feeling the coarse linen sheet against his collarbones, his breath coming in slow, measured counts.
His right forearm was on fire.
It was not the fiery agony of the thermal flues, nor was it the scalding heat of boiling vitriol. It was a deep, searing ache that burned in the fascia beneath the muscle, two inches below the pale ring of the Eleventh Mark where the bone stylus had scarred his flesh at the end of Life 8.
