The floor beneath Coach #404 groaned like a dying beast.
Fifty-eight hertz. The vibration was not sound. It was raw, oscillating mechanical force that rattled Julian Vance’s ribcage and made the water in his canteen foam like boiling beer.
Out on the apron of Track 00, a steel rivet sheared free from a support piling forty feet below.
Snap-ping!
The three-inch iron slug ricocheted off a grease pit railing and splashed into the dark, oily canal water under the depot floor. The concrete slab beneath the tracks pitched downward half an inch.
“Structural load is failing!” Lin Mei shouted, her knuckles white as she gripped the dashboard rail. Her thumb clicked the mechanical stopwatch. “Thirty-eight seconds before Silas Vane’s core transformer detonates! If that energy discharges into the apron, the foundation pilings will collapse like toothpicks!”
In Seat 1A, Harlan Reed dropped to his knees, clutching his head between his elbows. “We’re going into the canal! When an auditor’s core blows, it creates a fifty-yard gravitational sinkhole!”
“It happened in 1982 at the North Wharf Depot!” Reed cried. “The whole maintenance barn vanished into the mud!”
