The screams of Auditor Bao had barely faded down the mountain road before Lin Ke pulled up the topographical map of the Seventh Ward.
The heavy parchment was four feet across, pinned to the rough oak workbench with rusted railway spikes. Around the drafting table, the air hung thick with sulfur smoke, crushed bismuth dust. The sharp, sour tang of vinegar wash used to cool overheated iron.
“We saved Meng Shan,” Shen Yue said. She wiped gray lead smudges from her cheek with the back of her leather-wrapped wrist. “We can’t re-line seventy students in time. The Ministry has twelve more bells in Iron Crucible City, and Inquisitor Yan is recovering from his back-draft.”
“Patching single pipes one by one while the main pool is leaking toxic sludge is a fool’s errand,” Lin Ke said, tracing the outer edge contour lines with his blunt iron metal pen. “If seventy fire channels are taking contaminated back-pressure from the country trunk, you don’t wrap seventy rags around seventy valves. You drop the master shutoff gate and sever the supply line.”
Shen Yue tilted her head, her bright eyes blinking behind her soot-streaked goggles. “You sever the whole mountain line?”
“We isolate the entire gorge,” Lin Ke said.
