The Reverse Gear

It was not the physical fall into the turbine sump. It was the tearing, kinetic wrench deep in the center of my ribcage, the violent sensation of teeth catching in reverse gear, dragging my consciousness backward through thirty days of unspent hours with the force of an uncoiling spring.

·  ·  ·

Air hit my lungs like a bucket of lye.

I convulsed forward, my forehead cracking hard against the rough pine rail of the lead supply wagon. My stomach heaved, and I vomited a thin, bitter streak of bile onto the gravel between the iron-rimmed front wheels.

"Easy there, Mistress Fletcher," Tom's voice grunted from the driver's bench above me, thick with the unbothered calm of a man who had never seen someone die twice. "We're nearly at the cleft. You've been twitching like a poisoned hound since the foothills."

I couldn't answer. I couldn't even lift my chin from the timber rail.

A blinding, white-hot spike of agony was driven directly behind my left eyeball, pulsing with every heartbeat until the gray daylight felt like needles pushed under my eyelids. When I tried to push myself upright, my arms gave out beneath me, shaking so violently that my elbows banged against the floorboards.

This was not the lingering bruise of the first reset. This was worse. Far worse.

The loop was collecting its interest.

I stayed on my hands and knees in the wagon bed for five ragged breaths, forcing air through my nose while the world spun in sickening circles of mud, pine needles, and wet harness leather. When I finally dragged my hand across my upper lip, my fingers came away stained with a smear of dark, sluggish blood from my left nostril.

I wiped the blood on the rough wool of my sleeve and forced myself to look up.

The Southern Notch toll gate loomed thirty yards ahead, its iron portcullis rusted orange by three decades of mountain fog, hung between two massive buttresses of native granite. Fifty yards of mud-churned road separated our lead wagon from the border of the Barrow-Mark. The morning mist clung to the pines in damp, ragged sheets, exactly as it had thirty days ago. Exactly as it had yesterday morning.

Beside the gate winch stood Maude Hardwick.

She held the long iron operating lever in her calloused hands, her sheepskin coat pulled tight against the mountain wind, her gravelly voice carrying across the damp clearing as she hollered down to the teamsters.

"Fifty silver rings per axle, Mistress Fletcher! Or you turn those draft beasts around and haul your salted pork back to the valley!"

The exact same words. The exact same gravelly scrape of her boots against the granite flagstones.

I sat back against the sideboards of the wagon, closing my eyes against the stabbing pain in my temple until the initial wave of nausea crested and receded. My body felt fifteen years older, heavy and drained of reserve strength, my muscles trembling like an overdrawn bowstring. If I died a third time, I wondered if I would even have the strength to stand up from the wagon bed.

I couldn't afford a third time.

I opened my eyes, staring at my hands. The tremor in my left fingers was constant now, a tiny, involuntary twitch that would make holding a quill or a cup difficult. But my mind was cold, clear, and stripped of panic.

I knew how the board was set.

Running to the trade guilds in High Harrow was useless. If I sent messengers, Corin would intercept them or Cleary would simply drown the gorge two hours earlier. Trying to run defense, trying to warn sixty frightened merchants and convince them to turn their wagons around, was a fool's errand that would leave us all dead in the culverts.

Cleary Penhaligon held the gears. He controlled the couriers, the ciphers, and the water sluices.

To break the loop, I didn't need an army of wagon drivers. I didn't need to beg the Five Guilds for a treaty they were too blind to understand.

I needed Vance Ironwright.

Vance was the only piece on Cleary's board that had the muscle to seize the lower foundry and the tactical discipline to hold the escapement hubs before the sluice gates were drawn. He was currently sitting at the Copper Span outpost, reading a counterfeit execution order and waiting to see whether his honor would survive his contract.

"Tom," I said, my voice raspy and cracked around the phantom ache in my windpipe.

"Aye, Mistress?" Tom leaned over the seat, his brow furrowed as he looked down at my blood-smeared sleeve and pale face. "You look like you took a blow from an ox yoke. Should we hold the crossing?"

"No," I said, gripping the sideboard and hauling myself up to a standing position on legs that felt like hollow reeds. I reached into the lead wagon crate and pulled out two firkins of graphite-pressed tallow. "Drive us straight to the gate."

I stepped down from the wagon wheel into the cold mountain mud, carrying a wooden firkin in each hand. Every step sent a jolt of pain through my temple, but my boots found solid footing.

Maude watched me approach, her hand resting on the iron lever, her sharp eyes narrowing as she took in my gray skin and the dark ring of bruised tissue peeking above my collar.

"You look like hell, Fletcher," she said, though the flint in her voice didn't waver. "Contract says forty rings per axle. Toll's fifty today."

"The treaty sets the toll at four rings a tongue, Maude," I said, my voice steady despite the hammer behind my eyes. I didn't wait for her to argue. I shoved the two firkins into her arms, keeping my hands level so she couldn't see the twitching fingers. "And your third winch axle hasn't been greased since the spring thaw. Take the graphite tallow. Clear the iron gate."

Maude caught the heavy firkins against her apron, her mouth snapping shut as her fingers tested the tallow-stamped wood. She stared at me, the suspicion in her squint sharpening into genuine bewilderment. "How in the hell do you know about my third winch?"

"Because you complained about it when I was here an hour ago," I said, walking past her toward the granite archway without breaking stride. "And because I have an appointment with Captain Ironwright at the Copper Span, and neither of us has the time to waste on your toll."

The iron teeth of the portcullis began to rise behind me with a groaning shriek of metal.

I stepped onto the stones of the Barrow-Mark, tasting cold mist and the faint, unmistakable tang of copper in the wind.

The thirty days had started over. The board was reset.

This time, I wasn't playing to survive the night. I was going to take the commander of the Vanguard, hand him his contractor's head, and tear Cleary Penhaligon's wheel apart tooth by tooth.