The spray hit them with the force of thrown gravel.
Behind their heels, the Atlantic was no longer a flat mud basin. It was a boiling black cauldron of forty-foot breakers, funneling between the granite headlands like twin freight trains.
“Ninety seconds!” Lin Mei screamed, her voice cracking over the roar of the surf. “The wave wall will crest the caissons in exactly ninety seconds!”
“We can’t jump thirty feet, Kid!” Mac yelled, his boots braced on the sheared edge of the Carnegie slurry pipe. “Even with a running start, human legs don’t clear ten yards of open air!”
Julian looked down into the gap.
Below the broken pipe, thirty feet of jagged granite foundation had crumbled into the silt. Freezing seawater was already swirling in the sinkhole, foaming over rusted iron rebar.
The only thing spanning the void was that three-foot-wide ribbon of Black Laminate.
It hung suspended across the gap like a glossy black suspension bridge. It had no support beams.
