The heat beneath the suspended slab did not strike like air; it struck like an iron spade driven directly into the chest.
Alden Bram took his first step off the solid basalt catwalk onto the twelve-inch flange of cast iron, and his boots hissed as the boiling sludge on the metal cooked against his soles. The maintenance strip was narrow, greasy with condensation, and trembling with the mechanical fury of the waking core sixty feet below. Beneath his left elbow, the empty air dropped away into the amber glare of the churning mercury pit. Above him, suspended by straining iron chains and thermal friction, hung the twenty-ton gate, glowing a dull, angry cherry along its bottom edge.
His leathern apron, cured through thirty winters of stone-cutting in the valley quarries, began to curl and smoke where it brushed against the housing. The smell of singed horsehair and scorched hide filled his nostrils, sharper even than the sulfur reek of the furnace fumes.
“Alden, wait!” Jon’s voice came from the catwalk behind him, thin and desperate over the roaring thermal updraft. “The flange is too slick! You will lose your footing before you reach the latch!”
Bram did not look back. If a mason looked down at the drop while setting a lintel, he fell; if he looked back at the scaffolding, he dropped his trowel. You looked only at the stone in front of your hands, and you trusted the plumb line.
