The air inside the abandoned Roman bypass water chute was cold and tomb-like. He smelled of hardened river mud, wet slate, and ancient lime mortar that had turned to stone under two hundred years of river runoff. Pella Rook walked along the narrow stone narrow high walkway. Her tin lantern cast long, dancing ribs of light across the vaulted ceiling. Below her boots, the water moved at barely half a foot per second. A deep, sluggish water chute that bypassed the modern sewer mains and led straight into the forgotten storage vaults beneath the old city.
Her hands were stiff inside her wool mittens, her breath forming small white clouds in the draft. In her leather shoulder bag she carried four punched holes in clay lure canisters, each pre-packed with Imran’s tested mixture of roasted iron sulfate and river sand. Every forty yards along the narrow high walkway, Eren had driven an iron ring-bolt into the stonework to serve as an anchor point for their mid-air twines. Pella knelt at the first station. She tied an oiled hemp cord to the canister’s neck with a double fisherman’s knot.
She looked back toward the laundry sump. She could see the glowing advance of the colony. The river ribbon was flowing into the water chute like a river within a river—a forty-foot ribbon of liquid amber and semi-clear jelly, rippling forward with mesmerizing smoothness. It moved along the floor of the channel. Its feeding fronds swept the stone flags clean of algae…
