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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
Chapter 202
"Then find me the other door before he opens it, Lin."The river wind pushed cold air up the stairwell, and the smell of mud and old stone came with it. Lu had not moved from the top of the stairs. He stood between two of Beatrix's men with his head bowed and his hands folded inside his sleeves, and he looked into the dark without blinking.The lamp at his feet threw his shadow down the steps, and the shadow shook each time the steel rattled behind him. Melvin understood that the voice below had been rehearsing this moment for years. He counted the seconds between Lu's breaths to see whether the old officer would break first.Then a man's voice rose from the bottom of the stairs.It spoke plain modern speech, dry and unhurried, with no trace of the old tongue in its vowels. It addressed Lu by his old office title, with the impatience of a man who had waited a very long time for a clerk to come down."Presiding Officer Lu. You were always slow on stairs, so come down and let me look at
Chapter 201
The first proxy reached the top step and stopped with its grey sleeve brushing the rusted steel that Beatrix's enforcers had leaned across the stairhead. Behind it the column halted too, forty clay figures locked on the stone stairs with their lacquered faces tilted toward the lamplight. None of them reached for the blades in front of them.Lin's voice came through the crystal, sharp with concentration. "They're waiting for something, Melvin. Every thread in that column bends toward the loading rail, and the whole bundle is pulling at once."Melvin had taken the regulator back from Sun Wen at the end of the old carrier's cycle. The stone dragged at his palms in a long, steady pull. His own sight could not reach across a continent, so he read the proxies one body at a time through Lin's numbers."Read me the rail, Lin. Every needle there, and the depth of each one."Lin read the figures in a flat, careful voice, and the numbers came through the crystal one after another. "Kaelen's nine
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