The cloud of brick dust and sulfur soot hung suspended in the green lantern light. It drifted across the scarred worktable in greasy, waving sheets. In the lower boiler pit, thirty feet beneath the flat stone slabs, a child began to cry. A thin, reedy wail of pure terror that was instantly smothered by a mother’s hand or an apron pressed across a mouth.
Then the yard went fully silent.
Len remained on one knee behind the pine worktable, his sounding pole planted like a survey stake in the mortar joint before him. His breath came slow and thin through his nostrils, filtered through the damp linen rag he had tied across his face. Every muscle in his thighs was coiled, ready to spring. But Road Sense told him what his eyes couldn’t yet see through the dust. There was no running in the yard. The granite setts were littered with jagged shards of the shattered gutter, sharp as flint flakes and slick with freezing drizzle.
Beside the bread ovens, Doma Reel had not moved from her crouch. She had thrown off her apron and now knelt beside a low iron pipe hub connected directly to the main steam jacket of the kitchen soup vats. In her right hand she held a bronze lever wrapped in oiled cord. Her left hand rested against the boiler’s cold cast-iron casing. She felt the internal pressure build with the slow, terrifying thrum of a caged animal.
