The air did not scream. It hammered.
As the floodwater climbed within six arm-lengths of the high barrel vaults, the nature of the space underwent a terrifying transformation. An stone-built hall was designed to breathe—its doors, vents, and deck drains allowing air to cycle as tides rose and fell. But with Sluice Nine jammed and the southern channels vomiting forty thousand tons of water per minute, the air in the upper reaches of the Great Tiered hall had nowhere to escape.
It was trapped in the blind coffered recesses of the ceiling, tightly packed between rising walls of cold salt water and thirty feet of unbending granite stonework.
Qiao Ming stood on the highest tier of the northern arcade, his back pressed flat against the fluting of a massive pilaster. His boots were sunk in eight inches of foaming backwash. The water had already claimed the eighty tiers of benches below, drowning the seated judges to their chins. The smell of cold sulfur, crushed oyster shells, and crushed rock-dust hung thick in the damp fog, coating his lips in a fine, gritty paste.
Above his head, the first air-powered blast wave blew up.
It wasn’t a roar of thunder. It was the dry, bone-shaking crack of a high-pressure piston striking a closed metal tube head. A massive underwater swell surged into the intake throat of Sluice Nine. Then, the rising liquid head tightly packed a two-hundred-cubic-pace pocket of trapped air against the ceiling arch. It packed it to nearly forty…
