The wind whipping off the outer ash flats carried the rotten-egg stench of forty thousand burning beast carcasses, but to Arthur Vance, the most foul thing in Sector 7 was the smell of the mortar.
With Titus holding Foundation Pier 4 in an unmoving gravity vise forty feet below, the total collapse of the pier had paused, granting the defenders a fragile, ten-minute lull. The escape trench below was clear of living men. Only abandoned canvas stretchers, dented ammunition cans, and dark pools of clotting blood remained in the slurry. Arthur climbed the rusted iron rungs of the upkeep work frames bolted to the eastern face of Wall 7-B, his combat boots clattering against the loose steel mesh. Behind him climbed Instructor Valerie Koslov, her clockwork arm hissing as she hauled her six-foot riot lance up the upright ascent, her scarred mastiff Brutus guarding the ladder base below alongside Grimm.
At the thirty-foot level, a massive slanted fissure had split the curtain wall from east to west. The gap was wide enough for a grown man to shove his arm inside, venting hot, rotten-egg air from the hollow inside core of the stonework.
“Look at this fracture pattern,” Arthur said. He pulled his 9.5-inch heavy dark metal razor knife from his boot sheath.
