At three o’clock in the morning on the twenty-seventh day, the underground air of Sub-Cellar 4-B smelled of wet coal dust, cold iron scale. An intense, sharp aroma of crushed bitter pine-resin leaves. It was the natural secretion of the Lowbank lantern beetles. Thousands of thumb-sized, living-glow river crawlers that had nested inside the deep stonework joints of the lower floodwalls for three hundred years.
Imran Bell stood on a rough pine check bench, his wire-rimmed glasses fogged at the edges by the humid, rotten-egg cellar vapor. In his left hand he held an eight-inch brass-cased check torch, its yellow beam directed toward an upright joint between two four-foot granite foundation blocks. In his right hand he held a clockwork clicker counter, its steel ratchet clicking softly with every passing second: click... Click... Click.
Beside him, Pella Rook held an unrolled slate map of the drainage galleries, Hal Rook’s brass measuring tongs tucked securely beneath her apron strap.
“Look at the column, Pella,” Imran said, his voice quiet, calm, and fully empty of panic. He adjusted the knurled focus ring on his torch, narrowing the beam until the crystal-clear facets of the beetles’ dark green wing-cases shone with an eerie, emerald iridescence. “They aren’t foraging. And they aren’t swarming toward an open light source. Look at the larvae.”
