Master Mason Alden Bram had spent fifty-six years working with stone, lime, and iron, and he did not believe in miracles that could not be measured with a brass caliper or a plumb-line.
Over the past two days, he had looked at the ten stark white scar rings encircling Jon Hale’s fingers, the two pale keloid lines across his outer right wrist, and the four broad, band-like welts wrapped around his right forearm—including the heavy, clamp-shaped scar of Object #12, the iron mason’s brace Bram himself had entrusted to the innkeeper’s shelf. To Bram’s practical eye, those marks had looked like quarry-chain calluses or lime-burns: permanent, irreversible scars cut into a man’s flesh by the terrible weight of holding a town’s history across eleven dead worlds. He had privately assumed Jon Hale would carry every one of those sixteen white brands into his coffin.
Now, standing on the wet ash planks in front of the cooled intake breach, Bram lifted his brass miner’s lamp within six inches of Jon’s outspread right hand and squinted hard through his water-spotted spectacles.
“Hold your hand still under the wick, lad,” Bram grunted, his free hand catching Jon’s thick wrist to steady it over the timber rail while Elin Hale and Garrick Holt crowded in on either side. “Don’t move a muscle.”
