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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
Chapter 200
"Then whoever is pulling it has run out of patience," Melvin said.He drew the velvet case from his belt and took out three more needles. He leaned forward until his chest nearly touched the stone and drove the first needle into the disc beside the proxy's left foot, then the second beside its right, and then the third a hand's width behind its heels. Each one cost him a breath and a measured turn of the wrist, since the pull in the stone resisted every needle that went in.The three needles formed a triangle that braced the original nine against the drag. Melvin read the stone around them and found the hairline cracks he had feared at the edge of the black disc, opened by the strain and halted at the line where the new needles held. The groaning in the regulator eased, though only a little, and Melvin sat back on his heels with sweat running into his collar."The brace will hold for an hour if nothing else pulls on it. Lin, tell me what you're seeing at the warehouse," he said into t
Chapter 199
"Did Lu check that he died?" Melvin asked."Lu says he recorded Yan Shou as deceased in a private register. He says he never read the chamber's sockets, because he could not make himself walk into that room," Qiu said, and she lowered the plate.Wei's voice came in quietly from behind her. "He kept the record himself, and that single act of cowardice has cost this continent a thousand years.""A thousand years of cowardice for a thousand years of work, and I'll take that into account later. What matters now is who goes to the delta," Melvin said.He looked around the circle. Sun Wen lay asleep on the cot beside Chloe, both of them under Doss's eye, and Evelyn was still propped on her stretcher with her face grey. The proxy stood frozen on the disc with nine needles in the stone around its feet, and the thread beneath it held steady."I can't leave the regulator. Sun Wen can hold twenty minutes at a time, and Chloe can hold six, and nobody else in either world can hold it at all," Melv
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