The rain over the Iron Basin did not fall in soft, mountain drops. It fell as a dark, heavy grease, washed thick with soot from the cold chimneys of forty unlit smelting mills.
At eight o'clock on Monday morning, the central rail yards of Oakhaven—the industrial capital of Province 4—were silent. For sixty years, three hundred steam tenders had moved through these switching tracks every hour, carrying raw iron ore to the coastal foundries. Today, the locomotives sat parked in long, dead lines, their boilers cold, their steel couplings rusting in the damp air.
Inside the glass-paneled station master's office overlooking the yard, Governor Marcus Sterling stood with his hands locked behind his back, staring down at a quiet sea of five thousand ironworkers standing in the mud outside the gates.
