Bram didn’t wait to wash the silt from his arms.
He turned from the sealed check plate, lunged through the thick gray mud to the southern under-road drain wall. Then he grabbed the iron wheel of the solitude valve. The wheel was two feet across, cast with heavy outward ribs that had been pitted by decades of lime-scale and sulfuric vapor. With three violent, full-body heaves, he threw his shoulders against the spokes. It spun the rim clockwise until the bronze wedge slammed into its narrowed bronze seat with a dull, underground thud that shook through the foundation flags.
“Bypass isolated!” Bram roared, his voice echoing off the wet brick piers. “The water tank is holding! Water gate is sealed!”
Forty feet above their heads on the iron narrow high walkway, Tavi scrambled across the staging like a grease monkey in an engine room. The boy reached the heavy timber platform where the overhead belt-drive overhead frame hung suspended from the main rail stringers of the switching yard. He seized the six-foot forged-iron engagement lever, threw his entire ninety-pound body across the counterweighted handle. Then he kicked the locking pawl free with the heel of his mud-caked boot.
CLANK-SHRRR.
The heavy idler pulley swung down through its arc, biting hard into the slack run of the three-ply buffalo-hide drive belt.
