The grease-penciled map spread across the kitchen frame stand was drawn on heavy drafting linen, yellowed by years of coal smoke and stiff with dried river salt water along its frayed margins. It didn’t depict the Seven Wards of Rookvale as a land-mapper’s survey of land and ownership, but as a closed high-pressure circuit of cast iron, lead, and high-pressure steam.
Blue grease lines curved up from the bottom edge, marking the River Ward intake channels at height zero. There, the cold mountain runoff was drawn through heavy bronze trash screens. Dense hatched blocks filled the center at height plus twenty-five meters. The Tram Ward switching yards, the cable trenches running beneath the passenger platforms, and the deep underground chimney pipes that carried spent boiler water toward the sump. To the west, the contours dropped sharply into the Quarry Ward, thirty meters below the valley floor. There, the world-size heat sink was meant to swallow the heat surplus of the central lens. Above them all, crowning the northern granite ridge at height plus three hundred and twenty meters, sat the oval outer edge of the Star tower, linked to the lower basin by six main channels and forty-two backup bypass pipes.
