Dr. Victor Corvo did not flinch from falling metal.
In thirty years as Deputy Coroner of New Marrow, he had examined three thousand casualties of municipal negligence. He had autopsied steamfitters boiled by ruptured high-pressure mains, dockworkers crushed by snapped maritime towing cables, and linotype apprentices poisoned by hot antimony vapors in unventilated basements. He knew that panic was merely an inefficient metabolic expenditure that impaired fine motor control.
A corpse was never in a hurry. A coroner, by extension, had no reason to rush.
The four-hundred-pound cast-iron ladle was tipping directly above his head.
Six hundred degrees of molten lead-antimony stereotype alloy hung suspended in the air, glowing with a dull, cherry-red heat that scorched Corvo’s eyebrows. The liquid metal crested the curved pouring lip of the ladle, preparing to cascade down upon Lin Mei, Elena, and himself like a silver waterfall of liquid fire.
Beneath Corvo’s Oxford shoes, the broken catwalk groaned with the sickening shriek of tearing steel. The structural angle-irons had sheared under the impact, leaving the steel bridge tilting thirty degrees over forty feet of empty air and spinning web rollers.
Corvo calculated the trajectory in a fraction of a second. The viscosity of molten lead at six hundred degrees was roughly comparable to water, with an acceleration rate governed by standard gravity.
