The air at nine thousand feet didn’t taste like air. It tasted like cold tin, scraped stone, and the thin, biting emptiness of an unfinished sentence.
Ren Vale leaned his shoulder against the splintered tailgate of the rear supply cart, his boots slipping backward in the frost-slicked shale before the hemp-wrapped wheels caught against a chock-stone. His calf muscles knotted into tight cords. His breath rose in ragged white plumes that dissolved into the gale whistling up from the deep pit below.
“Lean, you stubborn ox,” a dry voice murmured from the cart bed. “If you drop that wheel over the lip, Vane will spend three days calculating the amortized replacement cost of twelve bushels of lentils.”
Ren wiped road-dust from his forehead with his sleeve, careful not to smear the drying violet ink on his index finger. He didn’t look down. Looking down meant acknowledging the four-thousand-foot drop through the floor of white fog. There, the red sandstone of the Western Rust-Dunes had flattened into a distant, blood-colored smear.
“Vane is sulking because the frost tarnished his silver pocket watch,” Ren rasped, his voice rough as dry parchment. He reached for the sheepskin flask hooked to his belt, unstoppered the bone nozzle, and took a swallow.
