The air inside the ruined tiered arena was settling into a quiet that Ostraka had not known in sixty years.
High above the crater of diamond dust, through the jagged rents torn in the twelve-story marble dome, the distant roar of diverted river torrents had shrank to a hollow, underground trickle. The waterwheels were dead. The steam pipe hubs had vented their last scalding sighs into the drainage gutters.
On the central cutting altar, the leftover bronze measuring tongs lay in twisted, snapped pieces upon the novaculite slab.
Ren Vale stood beside the table, his right hand carefully easing Mira down from the stone bed.
Mira’s boots touched the corundum melted rock waste floor. She swayed for a single heartbeat, lightheaded from the sudden release of high-pressure tension, before planting her feet firmly upon the flat stone slabs.
She was thin, pale. Then she covered in white limestone powder, her linen blouse torn and stiffened with dried sulfur paste. But as she lifted her head, the look in her grey eyes was not the hollow gaze of a victim. It was the fierce, steady light of a woman who had faced the cleaving wheel of an empire and forced it to break upon her song.
