In the shallow basin beneath Holding Cell Three, Melli Dorn’s arms burned with a fiery, exhausting ache that made her fingers tremble against the charred hickory handle of the sledge. She had snapped three of the naval bronze bolts in less than four minutes, her cold chisel biting through the metal on the second blow of each cycle. With each snapped head, Edda had reached into the swirling current with her good right hand. It caught the hot bronze chunk before it could bounce against the granite cut stone and telegraph a sound spike up into the guardroom.
Three snapped heads—heavy, six-sided lumps of copper-tin alloy, cold and slick with green rust—now rested in Edda’s canvas pouch. It was wrapped in scraps of oily sheepskin to keep the metal silent. But the fourth bolt—the south-western anchor—was an iron-hard, rusted through nightmare.
The bolt was countersunk deep into a pocket of hardened lead that had melted and re-frozen during the Year Seven blow-out. The six-sided head had rounded off under thirty years of sulfur water. Every time Melli set the cutting edge against the root, the chisel slipped three tiny fractions of an inch across the greasy bronze. That left a useless, shining gouge in the pipe rim. The impact sent a jarring shock up her forearm, jarring the bone beneath her thick leather glove.
