Chapter 439 - 438: What Grows
Location:Seven Peaks — Western Slope, Eastern Slope, Multiple
Date/Time:TC1855.03.15 – TC1855.04.01
Bjorn tested the ceiling by standing under it and breathing.
Not measuring. Not calculating. Breathing. The full expansion of a Northern chest, shoulders back, head level, the unconscious assessment of a man who’d grown up in halls where the rafters were high enough that you never thought about them. If you thought about the ceiling, it was too low.
The first hall had been too low. Cedric Vane’s modular framework was brilliant — efficient, structurally sound, designed for rapid assembly by small teams — but it was built for Southern proportions. Rooms where people who didn’t need to duck through doorways lived and worked, and never noticed the ceiling because it was adequate.
Adequate was not the word.
Bjorn had ripped out the cross-bracing on the second day and rebuilt it four feet higher. Cedric, to his credit, had watched the modification, run the structural calculations, and said, "I can make that standard for the Northern frames."
"Make it standard."
The second hall was right. Bjorn stood under it and breathed, and the air had room to go somewhere, and his shoulders didn’t try to compress, and the exhale that came out of him was the exhale of a man who’d walked into a space that understood his body.
"There," he said.
Silas, who was threading formation conduit through the floor channels, looked up. "The proportions?"
"The proportions."