The underground aqueduct system beneath Sector Two was an open sore in the belly of the city.
For three miles, Ren Vale sloshed through calf-deep drainage sludge, his heavy work boots slipping on green slime that coated the Victorian brick invert. Overhead, the vaulted ceiling was crisscrossed by sweating cast-iron gas channels, dripping wastewater water gates, and thick bundles of copper telegraph wires. But they pressed deeper toward the abandoned railway water tank. Then, the heavy-duty stonework began to buckle and warp under the weight of an ancient stonework that had never known steam.
Corbelled arches of dry-stacked grey dark rock snapped directly through the red brickwork. Roots of white stone-hard cedar trees, dead for two hundred years, hung like stone-hard stalactites from the mortared ceiling, dripping water that smelled faintly of mountain snow and myrrh.
Ren stopped beneath an iron junction box, panting softly. His brass saturation collar hissed with a rhythmic pulse, delivering a steady mist of high-pressure stone salt water across his chin and down into his throat. The dysbaric trauma from his Hadal contract with Deep-Diver Ren meant that every breath of dry, unpressurized surface air felt like swallowing lye. Without the cold salt water saturating his breathing tract, his alveoli would have seized in minutes. He wiped water drops from the copper control valve at his throat and checked his coat pocket.
