Ivara Quill knelt on the grease-stained floorplates of the tram kitchen, three inches from the cast-iron pipe rim of the waste pipe. She had set her survey kit on a folded flour sack to keep the brass verniers out of the mutton salt water. A set of graduated sounding rods, a vial of winterized coal-oil for dampening needle flutter. A sound stethoscope fitted with a wide copper pickup bell.
Her left arm ended four inches below the elbow in a rounded, puckered stump of scarred flesh. The permanent souvenir of Ansett Rill’s third survey seven years ago, when a runaway steam governor had sliced through a high-pressure line in the central Star tower. Her right hand, calloused and steady as a bench vise, adjusted the knurled set-screw on the sound gauge.
She pressed the copper bell against the shaking iron.
The sound traveled up the metal tubing directly into her ear canal. A deep, rhythmic thrumming at fifty-two cycles per second, perfectly timed together with the stroke of the central drainage pumps two miles to the north beneath the Survey Citadel. Through that heavy-duty pulse ran an uneven, scraping ringing. The sound of fingernails dragging across wet lime settled mud in an unlit channel.
