The unannounced draw began at seven minutes past eight in the evening, four hours before the normal midnight pumping window and right in the middle of the lowest spring ebb the river had seen all winter.
Pella Rook was sitting at the scrubbed beechwood table in Sister Merrow’s washroom. She rubbed warm sheep fat into the cracked leather seams of her canvas gaiters. Just then, the brass rim of the Courtesy Bridge gave a sudden, sharp ping. It was like a high-tension piano wire struck with a cold chisel. Across the room, hanging from its oak peg beside the chimney breast, Ada’s three-quarter-inch copper listening rod began to chatter against the mortar of the wall.
At the hearth, Sister Merrow looked up from the iron pot where she was skimming the grey foam off a batch of mutton broth. Her wooden ladle paused in mid-air as the surface of the soup broke into tight, wild nested rings.
“That isn’t a heavy cart on the lane,” Merrow said. Her voice dropped into the flat, steady calm she had learned during the harbor typhus year. “The cobbles in the alley are trembling.”
Eren Tal was already on his feet by the workbench, his wool cap in one hand and his heavy iron valve-key in the other. He didn’t look at the soup pot. He looked at the four-inch glass U-tube pressure gauge Ada had bracketed to the timber upright beside the back kitchen drain. A simple loop of clear glass tubing half-filled…
