Len stood at the base of the central load-bearing pillar of the tramway cellar, his boots planted shoulder-width apart in the lime dust, his uninjured right hand resting flat against the cold cast-iron pipe rim.
He didn’t look at the bandages bound tight between the cedar splints on his left arm. He didn’t look at the map table, nor did he look at the four green copper lanterns casting their sharp, protective arcs of light across the flat stone slabs.
His head was tilted back, his gray eyes fixed on the heavy oak floor beams twenty feet overhead.
Every other person in the sixty-foot cellar had frozen in place. Bram Ash stood with his hand on the handle knob of his wooden baton, his teeth bared in a reflex, silent snarl. Doma Reel held her wooden ladle across her chest like a blocking dagger. Dr. Sallow stood at the opening of the fire-curtain. His blood-stained bone syringe was held forgotten in his fingers. And the sixteen kitchen workers along the butcher benches stared upward with that hollow, wide-eyed dread that people reserve for an approaching avalanche.
The roof above them was an expanse of corrugated zinc-coated iron sheet, four hundred feet long, spanning the open car sheds of the old switching end-post.
