The rubber wheels of Clara Vance’s ICU gurney screeched across the frost-slick marble as the floor dropped thirty degrees into the black void.
Marcus Cole threw his body forward in a desperate, lunging dive. His heavy steel prosthetic arm slammed into the polished floor, the magnetic clamps in his wrist sparking violently against an expansion seam as he grabbed the bottom cross-member of the cot:
[CLANG-GRIND!]
“Hold her!” Mac roared, his boots skidding across the frosted stone. “Elena! Lock the front brakes!”
Elena Rostov was already down on the tilting slab.
The charge nurse had thrown herself flat on her stomach across the incline. Her knees dug into the ice-crusted edge of the marble, her boots dangling two inches out over the freezing, roaring abyss of the Sub-Harbor Brine Shaft.
Yet she never let go. Her right hand clamped like a vise around the tubular chrome handle of the cot, and her left thumb remained welded to Clara’s wrist under Sheet Z Rule Five.
“Brakes are glazed with quicklime frost!” Elena shouted over the roaring vortex of salt water below. “The rubber tires aren’t biting! We’re sliding toward the drop!”
