The path into the Melted rock-Heap Quarter didn’t follow a land-mapper’s line. It twisted through narrow, lightless gullies cut between sixty-foot mounds of glass-fused black clinker, where rain-slicked chunks of glass-melted rock waste jutted from the black mud like the ribs of sunken ships.
Tomas Reed stepped carefully, his boot soles finding purchase on the crushed cinder bed. The air in the quarter was trapped, held down by the huge bulk of the spoil banks that walled the settlement off from the river breeze. It tasted of sulfur dioxide and cold, wet soot. A sharp, acidic tang that coated the back of the throat. Then he made the eyes water after ten minutes of walking.
“Don’t touch the mud with your bare hands, Olla,” Tomas warned quietly, not looking back. “The runoff from the melted rock waste beds carries burning acid. It will eat the stitching out of your gloves.”
Olla nodded, her face buried up to the bridge of her nose in her gray wool scarf. She carried the route book hugged tight against her ribs, her boots crunching rhythmically behind him.
The apartments of Tanner’s Gut were not built of dressed stone or seasoned pine. They were lean-tos and double-deck shacks thrown together from scrap timber, discarded foundry patterns, and rusted sheets of corrugated iron salvaged from the fire roofs. Many of the walls were blackened with creosote. The spaces between the warped planks had been chinked with rags, river mud, and dried foundry sand.
