At a depth of six thousand two hundred meters beneath the surface of Mega-City 01, the huge dark rock cave had finally grown quiet.
The blinding orange rivers of liquid magma in the cooling trenches had skinned over with thick crusts of dark, glass-fused melted rock waste, venting only thin, harmless ribbons of white steam that smelled of clean, boiled stone water. The great forty-foot fissure that had threatened to tear the eastern seaboard apart was now a smooth, glassy seam of welded fiery rock, fused so tightly by Titus’s Disaster-Rank gravity domain that not even a hairline fracture remained.
Beside a six-foot-wide steel underground steam pipe that was streaming a steady, comforting warmth of forty degrees, Titus was living the finest hour of his four-hundred-year life.
The newly climbed World-Anchor Xuanwu Sovereign was huge. His forty-five-ton bulk occupied fifty feet of the cave floor. His towering dorsal was dark rock pillars rising twenty feet into the warm mist like the castle walls of an ancient coastal castle.
Resting on the concrete service deck directly before Titus’s massive snout were three giant, heavy wooden cargo crates, lowered down Shaft Nine by Toby’s hoist team. Each crate was packed to the brim with five hundred pounds of crisp, fresh, cold-storage Savoy cabbages from the newly liberated warehouses of District 4.
