The morning light hitting Miller's Ridge was thin, cold, and entirely devoid of warmth. It illuminated the violence of the previous night not as a battlefield, but as a compromised worksite.
The heavy, groaning timber of the bowed retaining wall had already been secured with secondary bracing. A fresh crew of fifty laborers, their breath pluming in the frigid air, were systematically clearing the heavy, saturated mud from the upper switchback. The hissing sound of sliding scree was gone, replaced by the rhythmic, industrial scrape of iron shovels against stone.
The slope bore a massive, jagged scar where the water had eroded the outer edge, but the geometry of the roadbed was stable. The switchback had held.
