Melli Dorn stood at the threshold of the kitchen vault with her four-pound cross-peen hammer resting against her heavy leather apron. He watched the four leftover casks of fever medicine being levered into the storage cellar.
Her apron was scorched black across the chest where hot animal fat had sprayed from the broken supply valve during the raid on Vat Three. Her thick wool trousers were stiff with black under-road drain slime up to the waistband. Her calloused hands were stained with graphite and coal dust, the skin around her fingernails cracked from decades spent before the roaring mouths of reverberatory kilns. But her pale, soot-rimmed eyes were fixed on the open square outside.
Across the Tram Ward, the street lamps were dying one by one.
The town gas mains, starved of pressure by the sabotage at the south switching station, were losing their feed. High on the fluted cast-iron lampposts that lined the railway row of stone pillars, the pale green-tinted flames flickered, guttered. Then it popped with thin, whistling sighs of escaping gas. One after another, the glass lanterns went black. That left only faint trails of foul, oily smoke curling upward into the sulfur mist.
The great, choking darkness of Rookvale was rolling inward from the outer edge avenues, swallowing the cobblestones, the abandoned vendor stalls, and the iron switching tracks. It crept forward like cold water filling an empty basin, reclaiming the territory that twelve years of artificial night had stolen from the living.
