Dawn didn’t arrive with bells in Vulcan-Khorat. It arrived with starlight fading into pale, midwinter lavender.
Through the jagged, five-hundred-foot hole torn in the heavy-duty dome, the first rays of true sunlight in two hundred and forty years touched the floor of the volcano bowl. The light was thin and cold, the pale gold of high-sky frost. But where it struck the cooling melted rock waste beds of Sector Four, the rotten-egg crust gleamed like crushed amethyst.
The silence that followed the disaster was heavier than the iron had ever been.
The roar of the quad-boilers had died. The shriek of the steam valves had dissolved into the alpine draft. The only sound left in the tiered arena of the High Blast Crucible was the rhythmic, crystal-clear tink-tink of hot hard dark metal contracting in the freezing mountain wind.
Ren Vale sat on a shattered granite top door beam, his back resting against an iron girder that had survived the explosion.
His lambskin scribe’s apron was scorched black, the wool charred away at the hem to reveal his soot-streaked trousers. His hands, blistered and stained with petroleum grease, rested limply in his lap. Every tendon in his back felt as though it had been beaten with a wooden cooper’s mallet. His left leg—strained during the desperate leap across the giant statue’s overhead frame—throbbed with a dull, sickening heat.
