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Chapter 208
"Then we learn it on the stone, Chen. Do not let anyone take that ledger off the rim."Chloe's breathing was shallow under the cloth, and Doss had left a cup of water within her reach before she went down the ramp.Chloe stirred on her cot and pushed the breathing cloth down an inch. "Melvin, I can feel the thread through the cot. It's running under me, and it's humming," she whispered."Then keep your hands off the frame and your back flat on the cot, Chloe. Doss will be back for you by noon."Lin's voice came through the line from the shaft head, where she was reading the frame beside the marshals. "Melvin, the cold patches are moving. The one in the car park is walking north along the western positions, at the pace of a man on foot.""Read me the pace, Lin, and the drain on every position it leaves.""A position every four minutes. It goes in, drains the volunteer on the cap, and moves to the next position in the row. The ones it leaves stay drained. They don't come back. Yan is wa
Chapter 207
The western network began to go cold in patches, and the patches did not stay where they started. Merrow reported the first of them over the line at dawn. By the time the sun cleared the eastern hills there were nine, each one moving across the car park at the pace of a man walking."Volunteers are speaking in the old tongue, Melvin. Only some of them, but enough that every family on this site has heard it," Merrow reported. His voice was hoarse, and shouting came through the line behind him."What are they saying?""Old words, the same rhythm every time. A woman in row thirty asked her daughter to bring her a plate, and her voice came out of the mouth of a retired clerk two positions away."Melvin looked down at the regulator. He had come back to the crater by stone ship in the night, and the flow came up through the stone into his hands the moment he laid them on the disc. Chloe lay on her cot at the edge of the rim with a breathing cloth over her mouth.Sun Wen lay beside her with
Chapter 206
"Chloe, let go of the left half. Let go now, and let the frame carry it," Doss ordered, and her voice was steady in a way she did not feel."If I let go, the left half drops," Chloe whispered."Then the right half picks it up for two minutes, and I'll count every second of them."Chloe lifted her hands from the stone. The left half of the bridge sagged, and the readings on the frame jumped toward the red line. Doss seized the frame in both hands and set nine needles into the bridge at the frequency Chloe's frame was carrying.She slid each one in with a turn of the wrist until the thread's pitch matched the stone.The thread went quiet under the cot.Hale's face flickered, and a thin dark line of pressure ran from his collar up toward his jaw. The marshals kept their blades steady, and the physician's body stopped moving. For one breath the whole rim went still, and Doss counted it aloud."Chloe, read me the bridge every ten seconds, and tell me the moment the left side wavers.""Yes,
Chapter 205
"Keep your eyes on the steps, boss," Kaelen warned, shifting his splinted arm against his chest.They went down the stone stairs in a single line. Melvin walked at the front with his sight open, and Lin came behind him with the frame. Kaelen followed with his splinted arm held close, then Qiu with her lamp, and Lu at the back between two of Beatrix's enforcers.The clay proxies stood on both sides of the steps with their grey robes hanging still. None of them turned its head as the living passed.The stairwell turned in a slow spiral, and the air grew colder with every step. Melvin counted the turns out of habit, and by the fortieth he had stopped counting the proxies. The lamp at the front of the line swayed with every turn.The chamber opened into a stone room of eighty-one sockets. Melvin read every ring and found each one seated and humming. At the centre of the room, on a plain granite slab, lay a man who had clearly been dying for years.Yan Shou's flesh had withered to the bone
Chapter 204
A thread ran down the chamber wall from the disc above and passed straight through a socket beside the slab. It was thick at the top and thin at the bottom, and it hummed at a pitch Melvin had heard only once before, through the stone of the crater rim."That's Yan's relay, Lin. Read me the socket and the ring around it.""Nine positions around the socket, and the thread passes through the centre of them. Nobody seated those rings to hold the carrier. They're there to hold the thread," Lin answered."Then I'll seat a breaker ring of my own, and it will hold the thread still while I cut it."He set the first needle slowly, with the care he used in the operating theatre, and his hands did not shake. He drove the nine needles in one at a time. Each one cost him a breath and a measured turn of the wrist, and the stone resisted every one of them.When the last needle sat in its socket, the thread stopped humming and hung slack between the ring and the slab.Melvin drew a silver blade from
Chapter 203
"Then I'll cut the line when I can reach it. For now, hold the flow with me," Melvin said, and shifted the weight of the pull into both pairs of hands at once.Merrow's voice came in over the western line, tight and quick. "Twelve positions have gone under in the last minute, Melvin, all of them in the north wing, where the cold started first. My staff are pulling them back now, one by one.""Bring them back, Merrow. Put your own hands on them if you have to.""We're doing it. Ten are coming up already," Merrow said, and the line crackled with the sound of people running.It took eleven minutes for the readings to settle. When they did, Merrow came back on the line with his voice dropped to a grim flatness. "Ten are back and breathing. Two did not come back, Melvin. Ruth Alden and Samuel Greer."Melvin closed his eyes for one breath. Ruth Alden had brought her own cushion to the car park every morning for nine weeks, and Samuel Greer had asked Doss twice whether his position would hur
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