Len’s boots left the lower iron rung and his body settled onto the copper floorplates. Then, the physical reality of Conduit Trunk B clamped down upon him like an iron vise.
The heat was not merely a sky condition. It was an active, crushing thickness that pressed against his ribs with the weight of an anvil. Every breath through the vinegar-soaked sponge of his leather breathing mask felt like inhaling hot steam through a wool blanket, searing the back of his throat and leaving a bitter, chemical coating of copper oxide and scorched sulfur on his tongue.
The crawlway was a sound and heat nightmare.
Barely thirty inches wide and thirty inches high, the chimney pipe was framed by double-coursed firebrick walls that radiated four hundred degrees of stored fire heat directly into his shoulders. Directly above his skull, hanging from heavy wrought-iron chain hangers by barely four inches of clearance, was the twenty-inch main steam pipe.
The iron pipe was alive.
It didn’t sit motionless in its saddles. It trembled with a violent, rhythmic, high-hum ringing shaking that set the fillings in Len’s teeth rattling. Inside that riveted iron metal tube, forty thousand gallons of white-hot solar drain water were roaring toward the kiln pipe hubs at seventy feet per second. Every forty-two seconds, the underground shock wave from the River Anchor surged through the steam line, causing the twenty-inch pipe to expand an eighth of an inch in width, groaning against the iron mid-air chains with a deep…
