Chapter 10
The port prison had been built by Starlings. Its walls were two feet thick. The stone blocks — four or five feet high and ten feet long — were covered with the fine parallel lines typical of unsmoothed Starling work. The blocks were cut, Race had learned, by taking a fine, heat-resistant wire in mind and forcing it into the stone, slicing it like cheese. When friction had melted the wire, the Starling lost it and slid another down into the groove. The traces of rust had long since come off the blocks; the prison was old, older than the houses of the Plantation on Mavia, and sweated with a clammy musk of fear and pain.
Race paced around it, incongruous in his finery. He had been noticed just once, when a jailer had offered to buy his clothes. Fear tore at him; he kept resisting
