For a long, painful minute, the only sound in the freezing tool shed was the faint creak of the ceiling floor beam as the one-hundred-and-fifty-pound ballast bag swung back and forth.
Fellis Dain sat back down on the carpenter’s bench. He held his left wrist against his belly with his right hand. His head was bowed, his shoulders hunched. His chest heaving with silent, ragged sobs that he fought desperately to suppress.
Ever since the night on Page 003 when he had carried a horn lantern to the drying shed doorstone in Kilnstep to offer Kezra his uncle’s old brass sighting compass, nineteen-year-old Fellis had walked every single mile of her journey. He had paced the black glass ridges of the first ecology, rigged the sounding derricks in the salt drifts, hauled safety lines through the Hushwood gorges, and dreamed of standing on the high alpine plateau of Empty Choir to witness the unlocking of Horizon scale.
To be left behind now—at the very threshold of the high peaks, while three companions marched into the snow—was a blow that cut deeper than any crossbow quarrel.
Kezra sat down beside him on the low bench. She didn’t pat his shoulder with patronizing sympathy, and she didn’t tell him that everything would be fine. She knew that to minimize his grief would be an insult to the forty-four days of blood and sweat he had given to the expedition.
