The wind along the crest of the Basalt Teeth smelled of burned lard and copper wire.
Ren-the-Cinder scrambled across frozen shale on hands and knees. His grey dust-cloak dragged in the ash. Every three paces, his fingers darted to the brass ring at his hip, counting the sixteen skeleton keys by touch.
One, two, three... Seven... Twelve... Sixteen.
None were missing. But the counting was the only thing keeping the screaming behind his ribs from bubbling up into his throat.
Beneath his scavenged leathers, his skin prickled with the cold needle-stings of his Exit Compass. It was a statistical nausea. That prickling behind his eyes drew red sharp-angled vectors through the air. If he took the eastern gully, the thread turned scarlet: eighty-four percent probability of decapitation by high-tension chronological tripwire. If he stayed on the open ridge, the line branched into three crimson ribbons: crushed by falling slate, poisoned by sulfur vent, or harvested by chronomancy flare.
“Stupid,” he whimpered into his muffler. “Stupid soldier. ‘Go scout the rim, Cinder. Secure the high ground, Cinder.’ The high ground is just where corpses freeze faster.”
He paused behind a jagged outcropping of black dark rock, wiping grit from his eyelashes.
