The current was tearing at Doma’s wool trousers with the force of an uncoiling spring, trying to sweep her boots off the narrow granite block. The scalding water was up to her breastbone now, churning with grey ash, floating kindling. The greasy yellow scum of boiled lard from the kitchen bins. The heat was searing through the canvas wrappings on her forearms. That turned the skin beneath into raw, weeping blisters, but she didn’t take her hands from the jack.
Then the turning-bar failed.
Under the huge torque of twelve tons of dynamic load and the violent shaking of the rising flood, the inch-thick steel lever bent past its elastic limit. It jammed hard against the pipe rim of the bronze housing with a sharp, metal ping, wedging itself so tightly that no human arm could turn it another tiny fraction of an inch.
The Acme screw had seized half a turn short of its full lock.
Without the clockwork advantage of the screw, the pine baulk began to slip. The soaked end of the timber shrieked against the oak stringer above, shaving off long, curled ribbons of wet wood as the downward thrust of the climbing refugees forced the strut backward toward the flood.
