On the lower stone ledge of the weir, the physical collapse reached its final, inexorable stage. Nessa Tern stood at the head of the wet check steps. She held young Avel firmly behind the heavy wool folds of her skirts as the quarrymen leaned over the iron safety rail with their hooded lanterns. The sulfur wind that blew off the boiling river caught the crumbling edges of the double’s canvas coat, peeling away dark, brittle scales of matter that fluttered into the foam like scorched leaves in an autumn squall.
The transformation was total, cold and exact, and fully empty of supernatural light. The figure didn’t melt into liquid, nor did it burst into clean flame. The simulated flesh simply lost its physical focus. Where five minutes before a living arm had swung an eighteen-inch railway bar with bone-shattering force against a steel door, there was now only a collapsing heap of dry, slate-gray granules that smelled of dead kiln melted rock waste, wet lime, and rusted copper wire.
For forty minutes, the lower weir vault had been a sound chamber of roaring steam and boiling runoff. The river current, diverted through the emergency bypass under-road drains, churned with greasy white foam that coated the dark rock blocks in a slippery film of stone sludge. Water drops dripped continuously from the high brick vaulting, each heavy drop falling with a sharp, ringing slap against the iron narrow high walkways. In this underground gloom, the physical unraveling of the double seemed…
