They lay on the flour room floor, gasping for breath, their clothes dripping water that smelled foully of coal tar and decomposed river weed. Orson was moaning softly on a bed of dry sacks, his leg wrapped in Sister Merrow’s clean linen bandages. Meanwhile, Bram clung to Miller Tom’s coat. He wept with relief.
Suddenly, the message slate on Pella’s belt began to chime with urgent, rapid double-pulses. She snatched the brass slate from its pouch. The green liquid crystal display—a modern marvel protected behind a thick glass bezel—was updating with wild speed, mapping a crude vector diagram of Lowbank’s street grid.
The text line read: SENSORS SHOW bone-crushing pressure SURGE IN SEWER HEADER. FISH STREET VAULT BLOWING IN 4 MIN. DO NOT USE MAIN ROAD. Imran’s voice followed through the open audio link, his tone brisk and sharp with tracking data urgency.
‘Pella, listen to me,’ Imran said from Harrowby. ‘The backing-up pressure from the Crown has created a high-pressure piston effect in the main brick sewer directly under Fish Street. The ground shaking hum has spiked to sixty cycles. The street surface is going to heave upward in less than five minutes. If you carry those injured boys down Fish Street, you will be caught in an eruption of high-pressure sewage and broken cobblestones.’
