The hardened rubber collar smelled of sulfur and boiled oil against Pella’s cheek. For five minutes she didn’t speak. In the damp underground vault, the cold seeped upward through the coarse burlap sacking, biting into her kneecaps and numbing the outer edge of her boots.
Beside her, Eren held the braided stay-cord with patient, motionless hands. His knuckles were gray with dried pine resin. His breath rose in thin, regular curls toward the weeping brick ceiling. He knew better than to ask questions while the horn was live. A sound in the chamber—the scrape of an iron heel, a heavy sigh, the metal clatter of measuring tongs against stone—would carry down the bronze wall like a gunshot through an empty barrel.
Before committing her weight to the rubber piece, Pella reached into her canvas apron. Then she drew out a small brass tuning key. She tapped the side of the bronze channel, three inches behind the pipe rim.
Ting.
The note was high and clear, shaking at about four hundred cycles. She leaned forward, listening through the vulcanized collar as the sound pulse raced out along the underwater pipe. Three feet into the bank, the note dulled, deadened by forty pounds of piled up river sand. At twelve feet. There, the channel cleared the stone retaining wall, the pitch climbed half a tone. It rang against the cold granite casing of the third pier.
