Chapter 29 The Furnace Under the Mall

Kestrel Arcade closed to the public at nine that morning, when the floor tiles on the lower concourse began to sweat.

Nothing about a tile is supposed to do that, and water only comes up through grout when the slab beneath it boils whatever the concrete holds.

By eleven the escalator handrails were too warm to hold, and by noon the third-floor sprinklers had discharged into an empty shopping centre.

'Nothing is burning up there and the water went off anyway... which means the heat is arriving from below,' Ossian read the incident feed at the depot, 'that is a basement problem.'

A Furnace Salamander sits in the sub-level plant room, eleven metres under the concourse, eating the steel support frame of a four-storey building.

Eating rather than burning, given that the animal takes metal in and puts heat out, while the frame it chose holds up the north half of that arcade.

Two hundred and eleven people work in that building, forty-three of them still inside at noon, with the owners calling guilds since eight.

Ivory Banner quoted sixty thousand against a fourteen-hour mobilisation, a polite refusal dressed up as a number.

The other three guilds with a Class Four licence in this district said the same thing in different words.

'Every licensed guild looked at that basement and went home... and four floors still stand on the frame it is chewing,' Ossian read the quotes over Paloma's shoulder, 'we are Class Four now.'

Nobody at the depot holds an operating licence, which Paloma answered by filing under an emergency provision unused in this city since the flood year.

The Unmasked took the contract at thirty-five thousand credits, added to three thousand one hundred and sixty already in the account, enough to clear every debt with change left over.

Rent, Calista's aftercare, Paloma's percentage, Bastien's shifts, the salvage fees still outstanding from the terraces, all of it gone in one afternoon.

That is the entire case for going, and everybody in the room knew the money came first before one word got said about people.

"Say it out loud," Calista put her coat on while she said it, "we are doing this for the money, and the forty-three are the reason it does not feel like it."

'She makes me say the true version first... and the forty-three are still forty-three either way,' Ossian picked up the gauntlets, 'both things, then.'

Maelle wanted one clause written into the contract, and she asked for it before anybody had gone near a door.

A Furnace Salamander core is the only material in the district that holds heat as an ordered process rather than as damage.

She has wanted one for six years, has never been allowed near a licensed kill, and the core is worth more to her than the whole thirty-five thousand.

Paloma got salvage ownership written into the contract in nine minutes, on the phone, with a building manager who wanted the problem gone.

"Everything below the concourse belongs to us," she read the clause back to him twice, "including biological material, including anything the animal has swallowed."

'She sold them a rescue and bought a monster... same phone call, off a man who never read it,' Ossian listened to the whole thing, 'hell, she is worth her twenty.'

Calista took the evacuation, given that the Mantis measures cost and getting people out is an arithmetic problem before anything else.

Forty-three people across four floors, two stairwells, one of which passes within nine metres of the plant room and cannot be used.

She had them out through the service corridor in twenty-six minutes, counted twice, with Bastien on the door doing the counting.

Nobody died in that arcade and no one came close to it, the part of a job which appears nowhere in the fee.

Thirty-five thousand credits, one afternoon, against a guild whose largest single payment until this week came from a court ruling.

'Every debt we have, cleared by teatime... and the price is a basement four licensed guilds walked away from,' Ossian signed the acceptance himself, 'damn it, sign it.'

Ossian went down the north stairwell at ten past one with Maelle four steps behind him.

Nobody argued about her coming, since the contract says the core belongs to the guild and the only person who can extract one intact is her.

"I will stay behind you," she offered that on the second landing without any warmth, "a promise about position rather than a promise about safety."

Heat at the third landing sat at fifty degrees, near seventy one flight below, plus the handrail had begun sagging between its brackets.

Sagging steel is a particular thing to watch with your own eyes, given that a handrail carries no load and holds the softest metal in the building.

'If the rail is going, whatever stands behind that wall is worse... and the north side rests on it,' Ossian went down another flight, 'shit, touch nothing.'

The plant room door had stopped existing rather than opening, with the frame around it running down the wall in a grey line.

A Furnace Salamander is four metres long, low, wide, dull red under a black crust that cracks and reseals as it moves.

It sat across the main support column with most of that pillar already inside its mouth, and it had been there since the previous evening.

'That is the north column... and there is a third of it left,' Ossian stopped at the doorway with the heat pushing back at him, 'shit, this building is a clock.'

Ironback Left went warm on its own before he had raised the arm, since the socket that stores impact has begun noticing pressure of every kind.

Nothing about that warmth is comfortable, given that a socket which reacts to a room has begun making decisions ahead of the man wearing it.

Maelle read her meter from behind him and gave him the only number that mattered in the room.

"Core temperature cycles," she said it with her visor down, "and it is hottest right after it swallows, so the animal has a rhythm."

Rhythm means a window, which is the whole difference between a job and a funeral.

She had six more sentences about cooling curves ready to deliver and never reached one of them.

Two people, one meter, plus an animal that had spent eighteen hours paying neither of them the slightest attention.

The salamander came off the column, crossed nine metres of plant room floor in under two seconds, and went straight past both of them.

That stairwell took its whole attention rather than the two people standing in the room, a choice no handbook says a Furnace Salamander bothers to make.

'It ignored us... it went for the way out,' Ossian turned with the thing already past him, 'that is not hunger, that is a decision.'

Everything it had swallowed came out at the stairwell door in one discharge, given that metal goes into the animal and steel comes back out.

Molten frame filled the doorway from floor to lintel and began setting, in rather less time than a man needs to cross nine metres.

Maelle put a hand flat on the setting metal and took it off inside half a second, learning more from that than the meter had told her.

Cooling steel that thick holds its heat for nine hours, and the arcade has a support column with a third of it left.

Nine metres of plant room, one animal between them and a wall of cooling steel, plus a column that will not hold four floors much longer.

'Sealed in by the animal that built the wall... it chose to do that, try putting that on an incident form,' Ossian put himself between Maelle and the room, 'stay behind me, as agreed.'

Then the emergency lighting failed, the plant room went the colour of the animal in it, and the only way out of that basement was a wall now.