The collapse came not with a crash of armor or a cry of despair, but with the quiet settling of an ancient ship coming to rest in the harbor mud.
It was five o’clock in the morning.
Outside the thirty-first gate, the air had turned that strange, chalky blue that heralded the rising of the distant surface sun through the high, water-filled light wells of the ceiling vaults. The white ash of the burned up swarm lay undisturbed across the four-arm-length drifts of the avenue, cold and still. The screeching of the black glass drills had ceased. The thrumming of the steam dredger was dead. And the two million winged locusts that had blackened the vaults at midnight were gone, reduced to inert calx and phosphate.
The ninety-arm-length upright curtain of silver light held true.
It hummed at exactly a deep hum, a steady, unbroken deep that rang through forty entry halls, maintaining the sanctity of the White Jade Barrier. But the organic battery that had sustained that hum—the human skeleton that had absorbed ninety-two nonstop hours of sound recoil, explosive concussions, and depth-pressure shear—had reached the total metalworking limit of human tissue.
Qiao Ming’s right knee touched the white green jade doorstep.
