Down on the overhead frame, Ada Morland was packing her backup pressure gauges into her satchel when Pella and Eren met her at the Third Gate junction. Her blue boiler suit was plastered to her shoulders, her leather arm brace was dark with water. But her mind was calculating high-pressure loads with cold, Yorkshire clarity.
“Here’s your play, Pella,” Ada said, pointing her pipe wrench at the roaring gorge. “You can’t touch that platform while forty tons of head are pushing against the central pier. If you put a timber sled across that gap while the water is hammering the stone, the spray will knock the cradle right off the thick ship rope.”
“What do we do, Ada?” Pella asked, her measuring tongs held tight in her hand.
“You starve him,” Ada replied plainly. “We open the Eastern Relief Flume wide. We open the South Basin water chute wide. We drop the high-pressure head in the main gorge by four feet in ninety seconds. That cuts the feed to Sorell’s drain tube down to zero. The wheel will spin free, the shaking in the pier will drop by half. The platform will stop shaking long enough for Eren’s sled to make the crossing. But you’ve only got an eight-minute window before the lower pastures fill up. When I give the signal, you cross, you get that lad. You get off that stone.”
