The shift between Nym Correl’s third volume and her fourth was marked by a sudden, violent change in the texture of the ink.
In the third volume, the lines were measured, calligraphic, and calm. The record of an experienced map maker working at her leisure before an activation. But in the fourth volume, beginning on the afternoon of that fateful twenty-third day, the dark oak-ink was dark, clotted. Then it smeared with nervous thumbprints. The handwriting pitched sharply to the right, full of jagged strokes and hurried abbreviations, as if the pen were shaking in a hand that couldn’t stop shaking.
“Body recoil,” Paxa said softly, studying the jagged strokes from across the desk. “A Quarter exchange commands sixty-four times the mass of a Reach swap. For forty-eight hours after firing an exchange of that size, a mapper experiences violent inner-ear pressure, migraine, nausea, and severe tremors in the fingers. She was writing while her balance was spinning like a tossed coin.”
“She wasn’t just shaking from recoil,” Kezra said, her voice heavy with grim realization. “Look at what she was writing. She was trying to draw the new hall intersections.”
Kezra laid her hornbeam-handled sighting rule across the opening diagram of the fourth volume. It was a stone-built cross-section of the lower station. It was drawn from north to south through the limestone strata. In red ink, Nym had drawn the original layout of the station. The entrance raised stone road, the eight-sided tower, the vaulted map hall. A…
