The damp brick vault of the laundry settling channel smelled sharply of roasted iron sulfate, wet unglazed clay pot, and the sour warmth of lye runoff. Imran Bell sat on an overturned heavy cart crate, his leather tool pouch open across his knees, step by step measuring out coarse reddish-brown crystals with a brass pharmacist’s spatula. Beside him, two unbaked clay pots, each punctured with fifty needle-point arrow holes, stood waiting on a scrap of clean sacking. Across the channel, the dark water stirred with the sluggish, jelly-like rhythm of the trapped colonial organism, its semi-clear fronds wavering like drowned silk in the lantern light.
Imran’s thumbs were stained dark brown from the iron salts, his knuckles stiff from twenty minutes of working in the cellar chill. He checked his wristwatch. Eighteen minutes leftover on his lunch break before he had to return to his van in Harrowby. Beside his boots, Pella Rook held a wooden tally board. Her eyes tracked the slow drift of river silt along the stone invert. There was no room for guesswork here. If the salt mixture was too packed, the chemical shock would burn the organism’s feeding cilia and drive it deeper into the boiler channels.
