The scream that tore from Ji Mingchuan’s throat was swallowed by the roar of the chute.
As the iron trapdoor swung downward into the void, the Scholar did not plunge into the water. In the terrifying fraction of a heartbeat before gravity claimed him, his desperate hands clawed at the stone edges of the chimney pipe, his diamond drill clattering down the shaft into the lightless deep pit below.
His fingertips found purchase upon the narrow hard speckled rock lip of the opening.
He hung suspended in thirty arm-lengths of empty air, his legs dangling into the howling vortex of the drain tube chute. There, four arm-lengths of black, skin-burning salt water were roaring toward the lower sound turbines at fourteen knots.
And above him, the blast wave of the trapdoor’s release had triggered a backup total collapse.
The four-hundred-pound cast-iron top door beam that framed the clean-out chute, weakened by decades of sulfuric rusting and shaken by the Scholar’s drilling, snapped loose from its bed-joint.
The massive iron beam slipped from the stonework, sliding down the upright shaft like a guillotine.
THUD.
