The jet of water that shot from the face of Pier Seven didn’t splash. It punched.
It was four inches in width, perfectly tube-shaped, and white with tightly packed air. That left the thirty-foot fracture at two hundred feet of water-pressure head pressure. It crossed the two-foot width of the iron narrow high walkway like a solid steel rod, struck the outer safety railing. Then it snapped three forged-iron support posts clean off at the rivet heads with the bone-shaking crack of a field cannon.
The cut section of railing, twenty feet of twisted iron, spun out into the dark void and vanished into the boiling foam below.
Tomas had Nessa pinned flat against the dark rock wall of the bridge pillar, his broad back shielding her from the stinging ricochet of spray. The air was filled with flying fragments of crumbled mortar and sharp, needle-like splinters of dark rock that ripped through the canvas shoulder of his coat, drawing thin lines of stinging blood along his neck.
“Don’t move!” Tomas roared against the ear-splitting shriek of the jet.
The sound of the rupture was no longer a whistle. It was an ear-splitting, clockwork scream. That sound so loud and nonstop it wiped out all sense of space and time. The water jet was hitting the far rock wall of the canyon eighty feet away, gouging out clay and small boulders that tumbled into the deep pit.
