Chapter 34: The Flood at the Test

The load ran down the western pier as it should, and then, halfway, it bent. Ilan had his left palm flat on the threshold of the Mercer arch and his eyes shut against the lamp glare. Something small leaned in the inner face of the pier where nothing had leaned at dawn, a pressure thin as a hair on a table, and his back teeth ached with it. The yard behind him smelled of wet wool and coal smoke. It was the forenoon of the eighteenth and the first stage had held at eight jars. Four hundred people stood shoulder to shoulder down the sunken steps and up Cooper's Stair, and cooperative men were setting the second row of jars on the crown platform. "Stop the jars," Ilan said. Then he said it louder, to the whole yard. "There's a line you can't see. Western pier, inner face. It wasn't…