By the twentieth hour of the sprint, the descent had become upright.
The outer edge between Entry halls 342 and 349 did not lie upon a single level plane. It followed the ancient stepped contours of the underwater land-wide terrace, dropping through seven distinct elevations toward the lower drainage basins. Each gateway was separated from the next by massive flights of stairs—twenty, thirty, and sometimes forty arm-lengths of sheer drop cut into the dark hard speckled rock bedrock. In the pre-flood world, these terraces had served as the great cascade gardens of the Astronavigators, where seawater was aerated and filtered through beds of crushed coral before entering the city reservoirs.
For an ordinary runner carrying sixty pounds of equipment, dropping such stairs at speed in the dark would have been suicidal. For Qiao Ming, it was an exercise in pure deep-water shape.
He didn’t bound down the center of the steps where water piled up in slick pools of green algae. He ran down the lateral margin where the risers met the wall, his bare right foot striking the edge of each tread with rhythmic, glancing impacts that absorbed his downward driving force like high-pressure dampeners. His knees remained supple, acting as living shock absorbers that cushioned the crushing moving impact of each descent.
