Bowman shook his head. “I’m not certified to operate the crane.”
“Yeah, me neither.” I took off across the snow toward the driver’s cabin, which was bolted to the frame of the gantry itself, two stories overhead. Seriously, the thing was massive.
“Where are you going?” Bowman shouted after me, but I ignored him as I stomped up two flights of metal stairs and pulled open the door at the back of the booth. “Ms. Walker! Stop! Have you ever even operated a crane?”
“One this size? No,” I called down as I stepped into the booth. But there was a reason Lacey called me “the Queen of Fuck Around and Find Out.”
The key was still in the ignition, which was common, in my experience, with equipment too big to be easily stolen. I twisted it, and the crane growled to life, the booth vibrating all around me.
“What crane have you operated?” Bowman demanded, still shouting from the edge of the manhole cover.
My operational experience with heavy equipment was on a need-to-know basis, mostly because it had involved a private nude beach and a hung-over leviathan who couldn’t make his way back into the water.
“You’re going to want to step back!” I shouted as I assessed the controls in front of me. No need to mess with the joysticks, because the hook was already positioned directly above the manhole cover. So I started pressing buttons. The first one raised the hook, and Bowman scrambled away from the pit, startled.
“Oops! Sorry!” It took me two more tries to figure out which button lowered the hook. “Hey, can you fit that through the ring?” I called down when the huge hook was low enough to just skim the metal disk.
Bowman stepped onto the manhole cover and carefully fitted the massive hook through a loop so thick I couldn’t close one hand around it. “This is a terrible idea!” he called up to me as he backed away from the pit again.
“Yeah, well, that’s the only kind I ever seem to have,” I assured him as I pressed the button to raise the hook.
The entire gantry shuddered lightly with the effort to lift the metal disk, but my buzz was something else entirely. It was power. I’d always loved being in control of something big and dangerous. Something with the power to crush my enemy with a single blow.
Too bad there are no enemies around…
“Just swing itslightlyto one side.” Bowman pointed across the pit to demonstrate. “Slowly!” he added.
I gave the joystick a tiny little nudge, and the huge metal disk swung smoothly past the pit, where I carefully lowered it to the ground. Then I turned off the crane and exited the driver’s cab.
“Nerves of steel,” Bowman declared, when I stepped off the metal stairs. “I’ve seen full grown men shake the first time they operate that beast, for fear of moving too fast and hitting something.
Point of fact: Iwasgrown. Several times over. But somehow the phrase “full grown woman” didn’t carry the same impact.
Some things hadn’t changed much in the past two hundred fifty years.
Kneeling at the edge of the pit, I ignored the snow soaking through my jeans as I peered into the hole, my coat spread out on the concrete around me. For about twenty feet down, I could see the curved concrete wall lining the opposite side of the pit. Beyond that, there was nothing but darkness. Cold, silent darkness. Without end, apparently.
“Somethin,’ idn’t it?” Bowman said, a series of little white puffs blossoming from each word like smoke from a steam engine.
“How the hell did you do that?” I asked, and he frowned, his expression one big question mark. “The walls. How did you line the inside of the pit in concrete?”
“Oh.” Twisting onto his knees beside me, he stared down into his tunneling masterpiece. “We have a machine that installs it in six-foot sections, over a spray-on layer of waterproofing rubber. It’s to prevent the whole thing from caving in and to stop water from seeping in through the sides of the tunnel. It’s the same method they used to dig that tunnel between France and Great Brittan in the 90s, only that one was horizontal, whereas...”
Bowman trailed off suddenly, frowning down into the pit, clearly confused. He extended one gloved hand over the open space.
“What?” I glanced from his face back to the pit.
“It’s cold.”
I nodded, assuming he’d developed a sense of humor. “It’s October, and we’re in Nova Scotia.” I wiped one gloved hand across my dripping nose. “It’s only a matter of time before we freeze into solid blocks of ice.”
Bowman pulled his glove off and waved his bare arm in the air over the pit, as if testing the temperature. “It wasn’t this cold when we were digging. I always assumed that was because of warmth trapped in the earth.” His expression turned thoughtful, his eyes distant and a little confused. “We must have gotten a pretty deep freeze with this storm.” When he leaned back over the hole, he shoved his hand into it, rather than across.
It took every ounce of self-control I had to resist pulling his hand out of the pit. I didn’t approve of introducing appendages into unknown voids. I knew of one unfortunate Netherworlder who’d lost a ratherimportantpart by doing that very thing. But I couldn’t exactly explain that to Bowman.
I sat back on my heels, rubbing my hands together to ward off the tingling sensation prickling across the backs of my hands. Was that the first sign of frostbite?
“This doesn’t make any sense.” Bowman shook his head. “It’s no colder now than it was during that ice storm a couple of weeks ago. In fact, it might be a degree or two warmer.”
