The working halt imposed by the Red Triangle froze every forward movement across the seven wards with the sudden, total finality of an iron brake shoe locking against a spinning wheel.
Three miles away, on the central tramway platform of Tram Ward, Doma Reel was standing on an overturned grease tub beside the main boiler pipe hub. Just then, the sight signal from the Quarry overhead frame flashed across the wet night sky. The three distinct pulses of red light, followed by the steady crimson glare of the hoisted triangle, pierced the dense sulfur mist hanging over the rail yard.
Doma didn’t waste a heartbeat questioning the signal. She dropped her heavy wooden ladle into an eighty-gallon iron vat of boiling barley broth, wiped her scalded hands on her coarse canvas apron. Then she blew two short, piercing blasts on her iron shunting whistle.
“HOLD THE CARTS!” Doma barked, her voice carrying over the hiss of leaking steam rubber rings, the clank of coal shovels. The anxious murmuring of four hundred displaced citizens huddled in the car sheds. “All second-stage fuel wagons stay in the loading bays! Lock the trace chains! No mule takes the switchback road until the Quarry drops the red timber!”
