The third tier of the hemlock staging hung twenty-eight feet above the churning bottom of the eastern trench, a precarious platform of split hemlock planks lashed to ash posts with tarred hemp cordage. Up here, trapped beneath the damp stonework vaulting of the eastern bridge pillar, the air was hot, choking, and thick with white sulfur steam rising from the unvented bypass water chute. The planks were slick with grease and condensed river lime. It shook with a wild, irregular shudder that made the tool buckets dance across the boards.
Bessa Marr knelt on a dry scrap of wool felt beside the bypass valve spindle, her oilskin sleeves rolled high and her forehead glistening with sweat. Her fingers, scarred from twenty years of clearing timber jams and wedging lock gates, held a four-inch brass feeler gauge against the bronze valve stem. Beside her crouched seventeen-year-old Joril. His face was pale beneath smears of black boiler soot. His hands gripped a ten-pound iron striking mallet with white-knuckled desperation.
‘Keep that hammer on the deck, Joril,’ Bessa ordered, her voice cutting through the hiss of escaping steam with calm, unbending power. ‘You don’t hit bronze under tension. If you strike that wedge before the pressure bleeds off, the shock will crack the gland and blow your hands off.’
