The iron rattle made one last, dying flutter against the timber handrail as Tavi’s fingers opened. The tool rolled off the pine planking, bounced twice across the greasy stringers, and dropped thirty feet into the black floodwater below, disappearing with a soft, insignificant splash that was instantly swallowed by the roar of the lower under-road drains.
Tavi didn’t reach for it. He couldn’t reach for it.
His knees had struck the wet wood of the landing with a violence that sent a jolt of pain through his kneecaps. But the pain in his legs was a distant, irrelevant thing compared to the fire that had just opened behind his ribs.
It didn’t feel like a burn from a hot fire pipe, and it didn’t feel like the tearing ache of a pulled tendon. It was an inside pressure—dense, heavy, and metal—as if someone had poured three ounces of molten lead into the heart-sac surrounding his heart. With every contraction of his chest, a deep, rhythmic shaking hummed through his collarbones, his spine, and the roots of his teeth. It sounded in his ears like the steady, high-pressure beat of a water-driven trip-hammer running three miles away beneath the earth.
The shaking radiated down into his arms. The tips of his fingers, stained to the cuticles with black machine oil, began to tingle with a cold, electric prickling that made the skin along his forearms tighten into gooseflesh. He felt the weight of his boots, the dampness of his socks, the…
