It felt like months since the Iron Gods had come. It felt like forever. The time before was a fading memory, already so distant that it was hardly missed, while the future… The future was endless days like this one: backbreaking, fourteen-hour shifts in the ruins of the city, eating, sleeping, rising for work again. It was remarkable how routine this had become, how quickly the human body adapted to the aches and strains, and the mind – for fear of going mad – to the confines of the here and now. Arex’s pickaxe had come to feel like an extension of her arms. She was barely aware of the calluses on her once-soft hands, beneath its wooden handle. Sometimes, however, her mind could still slip its chains and drift to a white-carpeted bedroom in the High Spire or an illicit liaison in a downmarket eatery, to the brush of a loved one’s lips, and then she was staggered by the pain of all she had lost. Arex sank to her knees and wept, drawing the attention of a grizzled overseer who screamed at her to resume her work and prodded her with a proctor’s baton.
