The concrete channel ended after four hundred meters against a huge iron grate that had been rusted through by decades of boiling chemical drainage.
Beyond the shattered iron bars lay a huge underground water tank. An ancient, vaulted brick pool sixty feet wide and half a mile long, originally built during the early heavy-duty spreading of Mega-City Seven to collect smelting runoff before the rifts opened.
The floor of the pool was a dark, stale lake of bubbling chemical sludge, three feet deep in the center, spanned by a narrow upkeep narrow high walkway forged of rusted iron grating that hung suspended by heavy iron chains from the arched brick ceiling.
Arthur paused at the threshold, holding his flashlight low over the murky surface.
The ecological devastation within the pool was staggering. Floating in the stale sludge were the carcasses of mutated blind cave fish, their bodies twisted by backup fin buds and hardened scales. Along the waterlines of the brick pillars grew thick mats of eerie-glowing violet mold. An invasive aether-fungus that thrived only in high-sulfur heavy-duty runoff. Every surface cried acidic moisture that dissolved iron at a rate of several tiny fractions of an inch per year.
The air in the chamber was choking. The surrounding aether reading on Arthur’s Monocle Loupe spiked to fifty-two parts per million. It shook with the jagged, chaotic hum of man-made mutagenic fields that made the back of the throat taste of copper wire and burnt vinegar.
