The stripped bronze threads on the left gland stud gave way with a sound like a pistol shot.
CRACK.
Before Corvin Hest or Auditor Nenn could turn their boots in the two-foot water, the rotted hemp packing ring blew out of the side relief valve’s stuffing box. A jagged, fan-shaped sheet of scalding water and wet vapor—one hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit—erupted laterally from the eight-inch elbow. It roared across the narrow width of the limestone vault.
“Down!” Eren roared.
He shoved Corvin Hest flat behind the shelter of the two-hundred-pound granite block they had just pried onto the floor mat. He took the outer fringe of the spray across the thick, oiled bull-hide back of his own work vest.
Ada didn’t dive backward. She slammed her three-foot steel rod across the ash wooden props timbers and hooked her left arm—the arm bearing the puckered, pale scar of the steam burn she had suffered weeks earlier—behind Pella’s waist. She hauled the nineteen-year-old apprentice ten feet back behind the projecting limestone pilaster of the fourteenth course.
The fan of 130-degree spray hammered against the north stonework wall where Pella had been standing half a second before. It filled the gallery from meter twenty to the weir with blinding white mist and splashed scalding salt water down into the pool.
