From the stone platform of the backup water chute station, Ivara Quill watched the two bodies plunge through the mist.
A veteran land-mapper who had spent seven years calculating shear forces. Then, balance weights, and stress vectors for the country waterworks, her eye instinctively registered the gaining speed of the fall. The drop from the six-inch stone footer to the lower upkeep staging was exactly eight feet. Not enough to kill an uninjured man. But more than enough to shatter an ankle or rupture a belly wall against iron struts when a body fell uncontrolled.
The staging below was an afterthought of heavy-duty construction, never intended for violence.
It was an iron shelf barely three feet wide, built thirty years earlier to give boiler mechanics access to the water chute bypass valves and settled mud cleanouts. It was suspended directly over the roaring sewer shaft, bolted to the upright brick retaining wall by three rusted through three-sided gussets of two-inch bar iron. The floor of the shelf was made of punched holes in cast-iron grating, slick with yellow grease and weeping black stone slime from the chemical overflow gutters above. Two of the three mounting bolts in the center bracket were snapped half through by thirty years of frost heave.
