In the dripping stone cellars beneath the River Ward bridge, seventy feet below the residential roadway, the river water rose and fell against the retaining water gates with the sluggish, oily heave of a backed-up sewer.
The basement air was suffocatingly warm. It smelled of boiled river weeds, rancid machine grease. The sharp, ozone tang that leaked continuously from the bronze intake channels. For twelve years, six massive heat-exchanger coils had vented the country sky shield’s excess solar heat charge directly into the underground riverbed. That turned the water into a tepid, stone-choked broth that kept the lower water chutes from freezing while breeding thick coats of slimy black mold across the vaulted ceiling.
Nessa Tern stood beside the main intake pipe hub on a raised iron grating, an unlit animal fat taper clamped firmly between her back teeth. In her rough, lye-scarred hands, she held an eight-inch steel scraper, step by step stripping hardened coal grease and hardened bitter salt crust from the bronze packing glands of the emergency bypass valve. Her knuckles were bruised, the skin across her knuckles cracked and raw from thirty hours of nonstop upkeep labor. But her strokes were rhythmic, measured, and relentless.
Beside her, the brass intake pipe hub hummed with a low, bone-shivering hum. A sixty-cycle shaking that rattled the oil cans on the shelves and set the needles of the three liquid silver manometers shivering against their scales. This was the pulse of the province’s southern lung. If these bronze sleeves…
