The smell of burnt meat wouldn’t wash out.
Back inside the dead-house cellar, everyone could feel the stench of singed hair, vinegar compresses, and the sweet, cloying reek of serous fluid weeping from open skin.
Lin Ke lay flat on a narrow pine cot, his teeth clicking together in a slow, reflex shiver.
Both of his hands were held suspended in mid-air by linen slings tied to the ceiling floor beams. The skin of his palms—scoured by sixty sea-weights of white-hot heat exhaust during the steam blowout in the alley—had peeled away fully. That left raw, red deep skin exposed to the cold air like freshly butchered beef.
Every breath sent a dull, throbbing spike of agony through his wrists.
On the next-door cot, Meng Shan looked worse.
The giant’s massive chest was covered in yellow blister ointment and crushed mint leaves, wrapped tightly in oiled linen to protect the three-degree spark burns left by the lightning chains. But the real damage was deeper. The fifty-thousand-volt shock had sent his heart heat flow system into violent, irregular arrhythmia.
Meng Shan’s heart was beating like a broken waterwheel. Three wild, stuttering thuds followed by a terrifying, two-second silence that left the giant gasping for breath, his broad fingers clawing at the straw mattress.
