The friction shoes of the broken-sun governor were forged from two-inch plates of hardened gray iron, curved to fit the outer rim of the main brake drum. Under the static holding load of the intermediate pawl, the friction between those iron shoes and the rotating drum was the only thing preventing forty thousand foot-pounds of spring torque from shearing the ratchet teeth.
By two twenty-five in the morning, the heat of the friction plates had skyrocketed past seven hundred degrees.
Water from the four overhead copper nozzles struck the blazing bright metal and instantly boiled away. The explosion of steam was nonstop, ear-splitting, and total. It filled the cave with a dense, white fog so thick that Len couldn’t see his own boots. Just then, he looked down at the floor. The sound was an ear-splitting hiss that drowned out human speech. It shook in the marrow of Len’s jaw and turned every breath into a lungful of scalding dampness.
Melli Dorn stood braced in her harness, breathing through three layers of wet wool she had torn from her sleeve.
Her exposed skin was covered in angry, weeping blisters where hot cooled water dripped from the ceiling roof beams thirty feet above. The cold snowmelt from the mountain pool washed across her skull, soaking her hair and chilling her neck, while eighteen inches below, the blasting heat from the drum scorched the hair off her forearms. Her body was suspended in a violent heat-powered battlefield between freezing water and glowing…
