From his perch fifteen feet above the flooded sump, Len Vey watched the oak drop-bar fall into place behind the freight warehouse door. Avel Tern was inside. Heth was inside. Across thirty paces of steam and trembling iron, the sound of the heavy wooden bar seating in its forged brackets gave off a dull, final thud that cut through the hiss of the burst chimney pipes.
Platform One was entirely empty.
Below the sagging timber flights, the forty-pace wooden deck where two hundred refugees had huddled an hour earlier was stripped bare. Scattered bundles of sodden blankets floated in the backwash near the track bumper. An overturned cabbage crate was caught against an iron support post, its yellowed leaves swirling in the grease-covered foam. Near the flooded baggage counter, three copper lanterns lay half-sunk in four feet of boiling wastewater, their glass chimneys cracked, their wicks drowned in gray town runoff.
Standing motionless along the flooded rail cut were the four dead Star tower conductors. Their showed up bodies, bound by old town transit orders, stood knee-deep in the boiling water with waterlogged warrants clutched in their wooden fingers. Their blank eyes stared at the empty platform. They didn’t pursue the refugees up the stairs. Their routines had no provisions for broken landings or collapsed drainage chimney pipes. They were merely office statues, waiting for a train that had not run in seven years.
