"A welcoming committee with loaded hunting rifles and a mounted heavy swivel gun on the watchtower doesn't look like they're planning to offer us tea and biscuits, Kael," Vance muttered, his boots sinking a few inches into the wet clay of the descending goat track as half a dozen armed locals materialized from the treeline with their barrels leveled straight at their chests. "Keep your hands where we can see them, and take two steps back up the ridge before I decide your faces look better full of buckshot," the lead local growled, an aging, wiry man with a graying beard tucked neatly into a heavy wool collar and eyes like chips of flint. Kael raised his palms slowly, stepping in front of Vance to block his rising rifle barrel with a sharp, warning elbow to the ribs. "We're not here for a fight, friend. We’ve got fifty freezing civilians half a mile back down the trail, half of them children or nursing injuries from the corporate relay

Sera pulled her scarf tighter across the lower half of her face, her breath freezing instantly in the biting mountain air as she hauled herself up another notch of the swaying, ninety-foot pine. Below her, the rooftops of Red Ridge looked like scattered wooden blocks pressed into the graying dusk of the valley floor. "If this wire snaps because you didn't tension it right, I'm not climbing back up here to fix it," Rian’s voice crackled through the short-range comm-unit clipped to her shoulder strap, faint and laced with static. "Then pray to whatever gods you still believe in that I know how to tie a sailor's knot, Rian," Sera whispered back into her collar, squinting against the wind as she wrapped the frayed end of the copper spool around a thick, frost-rimed bough. "How's the arm holding up?" "Like someone shoved a handful of hornets into my elbow joint and hooked a battery to my pulse," Rian grunted from somewh

"If you keep dunking a live thermal regulator into freezing mountain runoff, you aren't going to have an arm left to cut off anyway," Sera said, her voice sharp as she stopped three paces short of the river stone. Rian didn’t pull his arm out of the water immediately. The faint, angry hiss of cooling metal continued for a second longer before he slowly lifted the heavy, soot-stained limb. Droplets of dark, oily water dripped from the rigid steel fingers, freezing almost instantly in the night air. He stared at the lifeless joints with a hollow, dead look in his eyes. "At least then the phantom pain would stop pretending there's bone underneath," Rian muttered, his voice raspy and exhausted as he wiped his wet hand across his stubbled jaw. "Every time I pump the bellows at the forge, it feels like someone's driving a red-hot iron wedge straight into my shoulder blade. Miller thinks I'm just lazy because I dropped a plowshare this aftern

"Clear the way! Move that timber barrel, watch the children!" Vance’s boots hammered against the frozen wooden planks of the main street as he half-dragged a shivering, half-conscious figure wrapped in a filthy, salt-crusted wool blanket. Sera was off the river stone in a single stride, her boots tearing up the frosted moss as she intercepted them near the blacksmith’s porch. "Vance, what is that? Where did you pull him from?" "Found him collapsed outside the south palisade half an hour ago," Vance panted, shoving the stranger toward the warm glow of the open smithy doors where Rian stood rubbing his sparking elbow. "Man says he walked straight out of the coastal lowlands. Drop him by the hearth before he freezes solid." Rian caught the stumbling traveler by his good shoulder, guiding him onto a scarred wooden bench near the roaring coal furnace. The stranger’s face was sunken, his lips cracked and purp

"Day and night crews," Hobb repeated, his fingernails digging frantically into the rough wood of the bench until the knuckles turned stark white. "They aren't stopping for the weather, and they aren't stopping for the mountain. If your valley is in the way of the grade, they blast right through it or bury it under slag." Kael stepped closer, his heavy boots echoing sharply against the soot-stained stone floor of the forge. "How much time do we have before the vanguard reaches the mouth of the gorge?" "Two weeks," Hobb whispered, his chin trembling as he stared down into the empty ceramic mug. "Maybe less if the automated track-layers don't hit major granite. They've got corporate engineers driving the slaves twelve hours straight under floodlights." Vance let out a harsh, bitter laugh, crossing his arms over his broad chest. "Well, that settles the argument with Miller. We aren't hiding in the ridges anymore. The war is