Rain had been cutting the city in strips for hours. The Crossways interchange — three tiers of highway, a lattice of service catwalks and maintenance troughs where the municipal crews kept the city's guts accessible — had taken that weather in stride until it didn't. Cass Mercer smelled ozone and hot metal before the sirens finished their last loop; the rescue van's tires hissed on standing water and the windshield wipers fought to keep pace with sheets that hammered like fistfuls of gravel.
Jun Park rode shotgun, a tablet clamped to his knee and a micro-drone snug in its launch cradle. He kept one boot up on the dash, fingers twitching over a control surface as if conducting the little flying things by instinct. "Stanley's got a dramatic streak tonight," he said, half to the tablet and half to Cass. "He wants to get a better angle on the lighting." The drone's nickname earned Cass a dry smile; she had never learned to pretend at sentiment, but she could tolerate Jun's bad names for machines.
Tara Singh checked the ropes in the rear hatch, tapping carabiners and hollering soft reassurances to the team that were more habit than sermon. Ike Korolenko, the unit's heavy rig, cradled a salvaged winch like a mechanic would cradle a stubborn engine. Their truck smelled faintly of solder and the municipal food carts the city never quite kicked out of old service aisles — someone had been frying cardamom buns under an overpass and the warm, spiced scent clung to the clothes on the air like a memory not yet washed away.
They pushed into the Crossways on foot where the van could go no further. The upper lanes had sheared and slid; an old light-rail car hung between two monstrous girders like a caught jaw, its undercarriage grinding against concrete. Below, a maintenance corridor that usually hummed with ventilation units sat under a waist-deep pool. The corridor walls squealed black where brakes had kissed steel; a maintenance gate had been jammed half-closed and voices scabbed the air with panic.
Cass moved before she had a plan. She ran her gloved hand along a battered railing, eyes taking the structure in the kind of shorthand engineers used — telling a story in angles and stress marks. She slapped a strap around a corroded pylon, thumbed a quick sanity check on the anchor, and clipped in. "Jun, light and eyes on the upper bay. Tara, choke point at the gate — soft voices, okay? We don't want people hissing panic down there. Ike, give me a slow pull when I call it." She sounded like a metronome: precise, short, deliberately unemotional.
Jun's tablet pinged; the drone's feed slipped into the Live. "I see five down in the corridor, two bad — one leaning against that maintenance gate. Thermal's spot-cleaning him; he's cool enough for a haul if we don't shake things up. But Cass? Look at the coupling on the tram — it's jammed between two beams. If it shifts it does a lever move on the slab below."
Cass swore very quietly under her breath and let a grin she didn't mean show for a half second. "Lovely. Then let's not move that, shall we?" She snapped a prusik on her line, checked her belay, and kicked off into the void.