The dust of the collapsed ceiling took four minutes to settle. It drifted through the ruined rafters like grey flour spilled across an unwashed cellar floor.
Ren Vale sat with his back pressed against the black dark rock stonework, his knees drawn up, his boots resting in two inches of crushed limestone powder. His chest rose and fell in shallow, ragged spasms. Every breath pulled a dry, metal rasp from his lung passages. The clear wheeze of an artisan who had spent decades inhaling sulfur smoke, ink fumes, and the fine lime-powder of crumbling archives.
He looked down at his right hand.
The skin across his knuckles was no longer taut with youthful stretch. The outer skin had thinned, etched with a network of fine, pale creases that spider-webbed from his wrist to his nail beds. Beneath the permanent violet stains of dark oak-ink, his veins sat higher against the hand bones, knotted and ropey like weathered cordage. When he bent his fingers, the proximal joints clicked with a dull, dry friction that made his teeth ache.
Ten years.
The Law of the Burn didn’t deal in metaphors. The Speculum accepted the unlived lifetime of the Chrono-Registry. Then, it hadn’t merely handed him a contract. It had pulled out the living payoff in a single pulse. He was thirty-one years old in muscle, joint cord, and bone.
