Platform One was forty paces long and only six paces wide. An isolated concrete island was suspended between two different forms of death.
To the north, the rail cut was drowned in four feet of boiling wastewater, churning with floating timbers and white-hot foam that hissed against the concrete curb like hot fat in a skillet. To the south, the track was blocked by Morn’s advancing court guards and the four showed up copies, their carbines and iron bars catching the dull orange glare of the dying lanterns. To the east rose the sheer, weeping granite retaining wall of the tram cut, twenty feet of upright cut stone coated in slippery black slime, offering not a single handhold.
The only avenue of escape was a narrow, steep stairs built of seasoned oak stringers and cast-iron balusters. He rose twenty feet from the center of the platform to the high freight narrow high walkway. There, an unsealed service door opened onto the dry, raised ground of the upper wards.
More than two hundred people were jammed onto the concrete slab, packed so tightly together that Len could feel the collective shudder of their breathing through his ribs.
Len shoved his way through the press of bodies, his sound right shoulder driving into the crowd like a ship’s prow, his braced left arm held high against his chest to protect the cedar laths from being crushed in the crush. “Make way!” he shouted, his voice hoarse from sulfur fumes. “Let the clinic…
