The taste in Len Vey’s mouth was cold iron rust, sulfur grit, and stale black sewer grease.
His face was mashed flat against the punched holes in cast-iron grating of the upkeep shelf. Every time the heavy-duty torrent surged through the dark water chute thirty feet below, a spray of icy, chemically fouled water boiled up through the diamond-shaped perforations, wetting his eyelashes and stinging the raw, torn flesh of his cheekbone where the stonework had cut him during the fall.
Above him, the double’s right hand was clamped onto the two-inch solid wrought-iron handrail.
Len could see the knuckles from the corner of his swollen left eye. They were drained of all living color. White as sheep fat, the skin stretched so taut across the extensor tendons that the single bands of gristle looked like carved beef bone. There was no tremor in the wrist. No micro-burst in the flexor carpi radialis. No reflex shift of the thumb to relieve the crushing static pressure of the hold.
It was an impossible grip.
A living human hand, even the hardened, calloused hand of a veteran blacksmith or a quarry driller with thirty years on the sledgehammers, was governed by unbending living laws. Under a sustained five-hundred-pound static load, the tiny blood vessels in living fingers collapsed within twenty seconds. Muscle burn pooled in the muscle bellies like battery acid. The grip tendons screamed with oxygen starvation. And the automatic nervous system forced the fingers to loosen their hold before the…
