The maintenance guild’s hall stood on the lower terraces, and its doors were open to the damp air.
Mara went down to it at first light with Caldris and the Board clerk. Sera stayed at the operations office with the console, in case Anwen called. They took the service stair, not the lifts, all the way down past the third terrace and the failing regulators and the dock crew asleep on their cots, to the fourth level.
The pump hall was a long low building cut into the cliff, its front of old grey stone, its roof of corrugated iron streaked with rust. Steam came out of vents along the roofline. The doors were double, iron, propped open with wedges, and through them Mara could see a long room full of pipes: great iron mains running along the walls and across the ceiling, valves, gauges, a row of pumps thumping steadily at the far end. Workers moving between them in rubber boots.
It was the first building on Meridian that had sounded right to her. The pumps’ thump. The hiss of steam at a joint. A valve wheel squealing as someone turned it. Water running somewhere under the floor. She had grown up with sounds like these. The yard’s pump, the Low Brace’s mains, the dock cranes. Meridian’s upper terraces had been silent, polished, humming faintly with machinery hidden behind glass. This was machinery that hid nothing.
