The water in the drainage trench beneath the old ferry quay had risen three inches above the lower check curb, dark and thick with churned peat and mountain gravel. It smelled of anaerobic river rot, bitter green rust. The rotten-egg steam that continued to vent from Master Sorell’s locked core above the central water gate.
Pella Rook wiped a smear of wet pipe lime from her cheek with the back of her wrist. Her bottle-green apprentice wool tunic, stripped long ago of its academy badges, was soaked through the shoulders where cold water drops dripped from the ceiling ribs. Beneath her canvas apron, her ribs burned from forty minutes of nonstop listening against the shaking copper contact lines. Her fingers were gray with chalk dust and stained with grease-pencil wax.
Beside her, kneeling on a dry wooden cart hauling flat that Eren Tal had wedged over the sump, Ada Morland unscrewed the brass gland nut of her backup sound dial. The commercial plumber from Harrowby wore her blue waterproof trousers tucked into steel-toed boots, the leather worn raw at the instep from decades of boiler pits. Her bright jacket was unzipped at the collar, revealing the damp flannel shirt beneath. Around her left forearm, the dark tan leather of her squeezing sleeve was pulled tight, bracing the puckered, discolored skin of the scald scar she had earned two weeks earlier in the museum gallery.
