Day three was attrition, and attrition was worse than danger.
Nothing dramatic happened. That was the problem. The seven gates vented at a steady rate for twenty-six straight hours, never enough to break a position, never little enough to let anyone rest properly, and by the end of it the Gutwrack Span had settled into a rhythm that was slowly grinding four hundred people down.
Ainen's kitchen never stopped. He'd slept four hours across two days, in pieces, usually sitting.
"You're going to fall over," Kayla told him at the fiftieth hour.
"Then I'll cook lying down," Ainen said. "It's been done."
"By who?"
"Me. Twice. Different circumstances."
She left him a bowl of his own food, which he ate without noticing, and went back to the wounded.
The rotation held because Rudra built it to hold.
