The stair dropped three inches with a violent, sickening shudder that threw Heth Ash sideways against the cast-iron balusters. Her forehead struck the rusted metal with a dull crack. She opened a thin gash along her hairline that began weeping dark blood into her eyebrow. Young Avel Tern shrieked, his boots slipping off the wet nosing of the fourth tread, the oilskin bundle containing his dead father’s pocketbook tumbling from his fingers into the boiling foam below.
“Avel!” Heth gasped, her good arm shooting out through the railing, her fingers catching the boy by the collar of his rough wool smock. She dragged him upward by sheer desperation. Her knees scraped against the jagged splinter of the fractured stringer. “Hold the iron! Don’t let go of the iron!”
Below them, on the narrow concrete lip of Platform One, the leftover sixty refugees screamed in terror, surging backward away from the trembling flight. The boiling floodwater was four inches deep across the platform floor, lapping against their ankles, sending clouds of scalding sulfuric steam curling around their woolen skirts and trousers.
Len felt the shift through the soles of his heavy boots. His Road Sense registering the total redistribution of load as the ten-inch oak post beneath the landing kicked sideways in its underwater socket block. The stone block on the floor of the cut had tilted five degrees under the scouring current. The seasoned heartwood of the post had split fully along its central pith. The entire upright thrust of…
