The four-hundred-and-eighty-volt hoist motor in the ceiling screamed in reverse overload.
High above the black pit, the cast-iron monorail trolley vibrated so hard that grease and rust rained down in foul, oily sheets. Blue electrical fire danced along the copper collector shoes, illuminating the jagged stone lip of the Sub-Harbor Brine Shaft in stuttering bursts of harsh, chemical light.
The chains were frozen to minus forty degrees.
They did not bend with fluid grace. The four-inch iron links groaned, shuddering like rigid iron rods under seven hundred pounds of dead falling weight.
Out over the void, Magistrate Silt hung suspended by his monorail tether. His shattered brass tabulator swung like a massive, smoking plumb bob, spewing clouds of acrid white fumes into the rising sea spray. But his iron gauntlets were locked tight onto the lower hoist loop, using his own descending mass as a counterweight to drag the bridge landing into the deep.
“Brace your boots!” Marcus Cole roared, throwing his entire two-hundred-pound frame across the rear push-bar of Clara’s cot.
The bus driver’s heavy rubber-soled work boots dug into the frost-slicked tiles, gouging long black skids through the ice. His steel prosthetic left arm whined under maximum hydraulic pressure, the bypass valve screaming like a tea kettle as forty foot-pounds of torque fought against the chain’s pull.
