The cheering on the castle walls was loud enough to echo off the northern peaks, but Lin Ke didn’t join in.
He sat on an overturned wooden packing crate in the center of the shattered courtyard. His left arm was bound tightly in split-pine splints and yellow beeswax linen.
His boots were covered in grey ash and river mud.
On a rough wooden drafting board resting across his knees, he was writing with a dull piece of charcoal on coarse wrapping paper.
*
Behind him, smoke was still rising from the ruins of the outer wall. But the disaster was no longer active.
It was time for the Post-Incident Review.
Across the courtyard, forty percent of the thirty-six TLB charge bank pylons were melted into blackened, misshapen lumps of twisted iron melted rock waste.
