The bronze valve wheel sat in the center of the cedar table, dark, heavy, and slick with a thin skin of black stone grease that smelled of cold machinery and damp limestone.
It was eighteen inches in width, cast with eight heavy, narrowed spokes streaming from a central bronze hub. Around the outer edge of the outer rim, forty care fine-tuning notches had been filed into the metal by a royal toolmaker, numbered one through forty in neat, Roman-cut numerals.
Melli Dorn wiped her grease-blackened thumbs against her leather apron. Her breathing slow and was heavy from carrying eighty pounds of cast bronze up the steep incline from the rail siding.
“We pulled the valve housing from the backup bypass pipe hub in Tier Four,” Melli said. He leaned her palms against the edge of the table. “The casing is clean. The packing gland is fresh hemp soaked in sheep fat. No grit in the sleeve, no rust on the threads. If we mount this wheel to the subsidiary end-post under Bed Nineteen, we can bleed the feeder loop without touching the main grounding circuit of the Great Sink.”
Len Vey reached out with his uninjured right hand, his fingers tracing the bronze hub in the center of the wheel.
