Location:Wild Confederacy — The Northern Flats, The Bore Site, Eight Kilometers Northeast of Windbreak
Date/Time:TC1858.02.03 – TC1858.02.07
The mixing pit smelled like a wet stone left too long beside a fire.
Nobody had warned her about that, and it was the thing she went on smelling in her sleep for a week afterward: hot slurry in a cold place. The crew kept a fire burning in a trench under the iron pan at the head of the pit, day and night, because the mix took a skin at dusk and set to a crust by morning if you let it, and a crust in the pit meant a crust in the hole. Steam came off the pan in a slow gray sheet and hung over the deck. It carried the smell everywhere, bitter and mineral and faintly scorched, into the tents and the bread and her hair.
Mei had walked out from Windbreak that morning with a crate of empty glass tubes lashed to a hand-sledge and a letter in her coat from Speaker Kael-Ren. She didn't need to read it. He'd told her what was in it at the gate.
