In the narrow, unlit alley behind the eastern embankment, the escape of River Ward was an operation of desperate, muffled logistics conducted in freezing mud. The apartments that clung like barnacles to the bridge piers had stood for twelve years in the permanent sulfur fog, their cedar timbers soaked with river damp and coal soot. If the bypass channel burst during the high-pressure pullback, the cellars beneath these seventy families would become an explosive high-pressure piston, blowing the floorboards thirty feet into the dark.
Nessa Tern stood at the tail-gate of an iron-rimmed baggage cart. Her knees shook with tiredness, her fingers checking the hemp bindings on six heavy woolen blanket packs. Inside each pack, wrapped in three layers of boiled flannel to keep out the sulfur chill, lay an infant or a sick toddler, strapped to the shoulders of quarrymen who had sworn to keep moving no matter what sound came from the river. The wind coming off the water smelled of dead weeds, wet coal, and the stinging sharpness of unvented steam. Every breath tasted of acid.
“Keep the straps tight across the breastbone,” Nessa commanded, adjusting the knot on young Varner Crane’s pack with a savage, practiced jerk. “Don’t look up at the roof edges. If a shutter bangs, you don’t stop. You follow the lime-wash line on the cobbles straight to the Tram platform.”
