The interface chamber held a cradle built for a smith’s direct sensation.
Sen’s crew had opened it that morning. A small round room off the lowest chamber’s far side, behind a door that had been sealed with the same factory caps as the sockets. The crew chief had cut them out. Behind the door, a chamber the size of a forge’s quench pit, with a shield at its far end: a curved wall of thick glass, set into the rock, and beyond it, darkness. The central well’s rim. Where the collar was.
The air in it was old, though the well’s vents reached here and kept it moving. It smelled of something Mara had no name for, a dry, faintly sweet smell like hot stone after rain, and the dust on the floor lay in a pattern of footprints that had stopped a long time ago. Two sets. One went to the cradle. One stood a pace behind it, where a second person would stand to watch.
Someone had watched the operator, then. The records did not say so.
And in front of the shield, a cradle.
The cradles at Lorn and Hearth were frames of iron with a plate to stand on and a chair. This was more. A frame shaped to a body, standing, with straps at the wrists and the waist, and a headpiece: a band of dark metal that would sit around the skull, behind the ears, where a graft would be. Lines ran from the…
