Jo dropped through the hatch into the wheelhouse pit. Then, the water had already risen to Orson’s collarbones. The boy’s teeth were chattering so wildly he couldn’t speak. His lips were blue, his head tilted back against Eren Tal’s knee to keep his nostrils above the yellow scum. Miller Tom was sobbing in the corner, trying in vain to bail the pit with a five-gallon wooden bucket.
Jo didn’t look at the water. She looked up at the ceiling. Her flashlight—a compact, rubber-armored LED torch held in her teeth—cast a brilliant, piercing beam of white light across the black, cobwebbed timbers of the mill framing. The modern light made the wet oak shine like polished black glass. It showed every iron bolt, every adze mark, and every hairline stress fracture in the ancient wood.
‘Eren, Miller, get those buckets out of the way,’ Jo ordered, her voice cutting through the panic like an iron rule. ‘Pella, hold this torch on the overhead floor beam. We’re choking the bridle around the sister floor beams, not the broken header.’
She scrambled onto the slippery remains of the timber walkway, moving with the agile, confident grace of a steel erector working forty floors above the stone floor. She slung the first purple polyester sling over the ten-by-ten floor beam. She passed the loop through itself in a tight choker hitch that bit into the oak bark without slipping. She repeated the operation on the next-door floor beam five feet to the west. That…
