The scale house at Mile 28 had lost its roof during an ice storm three winters earlier, but its concrete walls remained eight inches thick.
Gideon backed the Ford truck into the open inspection bay until the rear bumper touched the rusted iron scale platform. Outside, dusk came on fast and gray across the fallow soybean fields, the sky the color of dirty slate. A cold north wind hummed through the gaps in the cinderblocks, carrying the smell of wet limestone and the faint, bitter reek of distant coal smoke.
Mara pulled the galvanized steel door shut, dropping a four-by-four timber across the brackets.
Inside the bay, the light failed quickly. Luis set a single shielded storm-glass lantern on an overturned oil drum in the corner. Its shutter was cracked only an inch, throwing a pale turquoise stripe across the concrete floor and illuminating the dust drifting from their boots.
Luis knelt beside the child, unscrewing the brass inspection cap on her hip pouch.
“Pressure holding at point-eight,” Luis said, shining a penlight onto the tiny glass gauge. “Cathode pin clear. How are your shoulders?”
“They don’t itch anymore,” the girl said.
She sat on a wooden produce crate with her knees pulled up, chin resting on her sweater. The brown wool was smudged with road dust from the truck cab. Beside her sat Naomi Chen, wrapped in her corduroy coat, checking the inventory tally against the three carbon receipts she kept clipped to her yellow pad.
