Korr Var threw open the heavy oak check door of Assembly Bay Four. Then, the air inside the windowless stone cube was hot, dry, and thick with the smell of scorched shellac and ozone. In the center of the chamber stood the fourteen-piece brass frame of the Courtesy Arch, bolted upright to the cast-iron floor plate like a prisoner in an iron stock.
Clamped across the top deep ring bar—right over the delicate three-inch Courtesy gap that Pella had polished with dry flannel every morning in Sister Merrow’s washroom—sat a thirty-pound cast-bronze magnetic-pull yoke. Its toothed jaws had been screwed down with steel set-bolts until the soft brass casing of the arch was visibly dented. Every four seconds a dull, bluish-white spark jumped across the backup step-down coil as another pulse of stored reserve was sucked down the braided copper wall-cables toward the Hollow Crown.
At the sight of her scarred doorway being bled like a tapped cask, a hot surge of fury rose in Pella’s throat. She took two rapid strides across the stone floor. She pulled the heavy ten-inch iron box-wrench from her apron pocket to knock the set-bolts loose.
“Wait, Pella—hold your hand!” Examiner Corvin Hest caught her right elbow. Meanwhile, Foreman Eren Tal stepped at the same time between her boots and the copper floor-cable. “Look at the iron hoist-block hanging from the ceiling beam above the step-down coil before you put a wrench on that clamp!”
