The "safe disposal" wagons left Valmere at midnight, their iron wheels grinding against the frost-covered gravel of the main path. Inside the lead wagon, I lay flat against the cold metal floor, buried under a mountain of neutralized scrap and the ash of my own "dummy" construct. The air was thick with the smell of ozone and wet iron, but the vibration of the road was the only thing I cared about.
Beside me, Cael was a shadow among shadows, his breathing so shallow it was almost non-existent. We had bypassed the gate guards by timing our heartbeat to the rotation of the wagon's axles—a trick I'd pulled from Merek's notes on Acoustic Masking.
By aligning our internal rhythm to the fundamental frequency of the wagon's resonance, we had become invisible to the vibration sensors Vane had placed at the exit. To the guards, we were just more dead weight being hauled to the city's forge-pits.
