The sound of rising water in a sealed hall was unlike any sound upon the surface of the earth.
It didn’t crash like open surf, nor did it ripple like a mountain stream. In the vast, underground bowl of Entry hall 014—a sunken basin three hundred paces across, paved with dense black hard speckled rock and ringed by massive retaining walls eighty arm-lengths high—the water arrived as a dark, oily swelling that rose through forty underground drainage deck drains with a terrifying, hollow gurgle.
The fifth tide of the day had turned in the deep-sea trenches leagues below. Pushed by the huge deep water pressure of the drowned ocean, millions of gallons of freezing, salt-laden salt water were boiling upward into the basin. In less than ten minutes, the water had risen from the floor flags to the knees of the nearly two million refugees packed into the lower court.
Ahead of them, blocking the wide arched exit toward Entry hall 015 and the dry inner courtyards, stood the Great Flood-Lock of the Low Tide. A huge gate of cast green sea-bronze, sixty arm-lengths wide and forty arm-lengths tall, sealed tight within its granite grooves by four heavy locking dogs the thickness of ancient cedar logs.
