Beneath the central arch of the River bridge, seventy feet below the evacuated apartments, the main weir chamber was a roaring cathedral of black dark rock and churning foam. The country sky shield’s southern pressure channel anchored directly into the bedrock here, venting excess solar heat energy into the underground river through six massive bronze heat-exchanger coils. For twelve years, those coils had kept the river from freezing. That created the choking, humid spore-mist that hung permanently over the lower wards.
The air in the chamber was blistering, thick with sulfur vapor and the ear-splitting bone-shaking roar of fifty thousand cubic feet of river water tearing through the intake water gates. Every surface dripped with oily water drops. The massive granite arches that supported the bridge roadway above shook with a sickening, high-hum shudder every forty-two seconds, exactly matching the heat-powered pulse Ivara Quill had calculated from the Star tower ephemeris.
For twelve years, the people of Rookvale had believed the river’s unnatural warmth was a blessing. A town gift that kept the water wheels turning and the cabbage plots from freezing solid during the unending night. None of them had known that the warmth was the exhaust of an office fire, a heat sink absorbing the energy stolen from their own bodies and stored in the central quartz lens above.
