Dust hung in the workshop like crushed bone.
Behind the collapsed top door beam, the muffled sound of air-powered drill-picks hammered against the limestone rubble—chug-chug-thump—shaking through the stone floor in rapid, teeth-rattling pulses. The Harvesters were drilling pilot holes for high-pressure spreader jacks. They had fifteen minutes, perhaps twenty, before the wall came down.
Artificer Ren didn’t spare a glance for the barricade. He had dragged the pine workbench closer to the center of the room, away from the weeping stonework walls, and lit three more animal fat rushlights.
“Boy,” the Artificer rasped. He wiped a smear of grey dust from his jewelers’ loupes with a flannel rag. “The third node is fused directly to the around the heart sheath. Look through the tiny lens.”
Ren Vale stepped to the bench, his movements stiff and deliberate. With every step, his kneecaps and ankles clicked with dry, baked-clay stiffness. He leaned over the pine table. He peeked through the said clearlydiamond magnifying glass hovering above Mira’s chest.
What he saw stole the breath from his throat.
Under eight-fold zoom, Mira’s collarbone was no longer human anatomy. It was an alpine landscape of smoky quartz crystals, their prismatic faces growing inward in linked six-sided needles. Two jagged crystal-clear spurs—clear as ice. But veined with deep purple inclusions. Had pierced the rib muscle between her third and fourth ribs. The sharpest tip was resting directly against the pulsing stringy sac of her heart-sac. Every time her heart swelled in diastole, the white stringy…
