Twenty feet behind the blind rock nose, Kezra Venn held the backup hemp haul line in her callused right hand, her shoulder braced against a shallow limestone stone support prop where the cliff path widened to twenty inches. The morning wind was rising out of the south, funneling through the narrow ravine below and setting the pine crowns into a deep, rhythmic roaring that shook through the rock under her knees.
To anyone with two sound ears, that wind would have been an annoyance. To Kezra, it was a wall. The low-hum rumble of the forest crowns matched the exact ringing pitch of her injured left ear, churning every sound on that side into a thick, muddy thrumming that wiped out all aimed sense. If someone had shouted a warning from twenty paces away on her left, the words would have registered only as a dull thump against her eardrum, stripped of consonants and urgency. The injury was thirty days old now, earned during the massive Reach exchange in the Saltglass quarries. But its daily cost never shrank. It demanded constant vigilance. That forced her to position herself so that the open world lay on her right side while stone guarded her left.
