At eighteen minutes past noon, the red seam of Sleeve Alpha fulfilled its destiny. The internal pressure registered seventy-nine point four pounds on Ada’s remote pipe hub. A sound like three linen bedsheets tearing at the same time in a hurricane gale ripped through the basin, followed instantly by a thunderous, explosive roar as the bottom half of the canvas sleeve split cleanly along the red running stitches.
A twelve-foot fan of brown, foaming floodwater erupted outward from the split, throwing forty tons of mountain peat and crushed shale across the empty mud flats of the turning basin. A wooden tool trough and six empty lime barrels were smashed into kindling by the moving wave, their splintered staves tossed twenty feet into the air like dry twigs.
Behind the three-inch oak shield frame, Jo Saye, Dima, and young Rob stood fully unharmed, the heavy timber balks absorbing the first spray with a dull, hollow thud. The water washed around the base of the frame, swirling harmlessly around their cart driver boots before draining away through the lower gravel channels toward the river.
Down in the Third Gate undercroft, the effect was instant and miraculous. The screaming baked-clay trunk went silent as the backing-up pressure wave collapsed. The liquid silver in Ada’s glass gauge plummeted from sixty-eight pounds down to thirty-two in a single, smooth descent. On the overhead frame above, Eren Tal let out a mighty, gravelly cheer that echoed across the gorge: “She blew! The seam tore clean as…
