The water on Tier Two reached Tomas’s waist, freezing cold and stinging with the skin-burning bite of dissolved sulfuric salts.
The underground magazine tilted thirty degrees into the bog, its massive granite ceiling blocks groaning under seventy feet of soaked peat. Tomas stood on the underwater stone ledge, his boxwood-pegged boots wedged firmly into the stonework joints to counter the slick, oily silt that coated the floor.
Beside him, young Darrow stood shivering wildly, his teeth chattering against the rim of his vinegar-soaked linen breathing mask. The green glow from their moss jars reflected off the black, stale pool. It cast eerie emerald ripples across the weeping hardwood racks.
“Keep your footing wide, Darrow,” Tomas whispered, his voice calm and low. “Let the water take half the weight. If your boot slips, lean your shoulder against the granite pillar, not against the crate.”
Tier Two held Crates Eleven through Twenty. The hardwood boxes sat wedged into the second tier of the storage rack, five feet below the ceiling and two feet above the dark, bubbling water. Over nineteen years of flooding, the wood had swollen. It locked the tongue-and-groove joints into the hardwood uprights like living roots.
Nessa Vale floated beside them on a small pontoon raft of cedar logs. She held the sound rod against the rack. “The uprights are stressed, Tomas. The lower shelf has taken three tons of settling mud. If you pry Crate Eleven too hard, the entire second tier will cantilever forward and dump all…
