By six in the morning on the twenty-fourth day, the underground defense network of Lathmere was fully completed, checked. Then he placed under town guard.
On the master slate in Sister Merrow’s washroom, Corvin had drawn the final composite working map. The forty-acre Ferry Turning Basin was open and holding three feet of water. The twin flexible reed sleeves were stitched, cradled in ash ribs, and fitted with their offering Bulldog seams. The three shutdown stations were manned by twenty-four trained local tradesmen. And the cool beetle karst passage provided a ninety-second extra messenger route beneath the boiling vaults.
Before closing the air-flow back gate, Imran Bell guided Pella through the delicate work of protecting the native lantern beetle colonies. Working with small wooden spatulas, they gently relocated hundreds of beetle egg clusters away from the new handrail foot traffic, marking the undisturbed rock crevices with white chalk boundaries.
Pella stood before the Courtesy Arch. There, the indigo light was humming with huge, stable energy. Across the threshold in Harrowby, Ada Morland, Jo Saye, and Imran Bell stood ready for their ninety-minute deployment, their tools checked, their domestic lives secured, their sovereign return tabs primed.
High above the city, through the dark storm clouds rolling over the peaks, the first thunderclaps of the approaching mountain crest echoed down the river gorge. The water was coming. But for the first time in fourteen years, the people of Lathmere were not waiting to be saved by a miracle. They had built their…
