Chapter 78 - The Unbroken Seam
"Don't listen to him, he’s bluffing!" Julian shouted, grabbing at the surveyor’s arm. "Blow the first charge! Drop the northern wall!"
"He's not bluffing, Julian," the surveyor said, his voice trembling as he watched the digital readout drop past *12:15*. "Look at the tension gauges on the support columns. The whole mountain is suspended on this single pressure pocket. If he seats that key, the flume closes and the siphon equalizes. If we blow it, the floor drops out."
"Give me that!" Julian lunged for the detonator.
The two men grappled on the narrow steel grating of the gantry, eighty feet above the roaring abyss.
"Sam! Go!" Dad yelled from the rim. He raised his crowbar and slammed it against the bronze conduit running along the wall, sending a shower of sparks into the dark to distract them.
I ran.
The three-foot stone ledge was slick with algae and spray, but my boots found purchase on the ancient chiseling. The wind whipped by the swirling waters tore at my jacket. Ten yards. Five yards. I leaped across the gap onto the central dais.
The pedestal stood at waist height, carved from a single solid block of black granite. At its center was a star-shaped aperture lined with six spiral channels.
The digital timer on the gantry chimed: *05:00... 04:59... 04:58.*
Julian broke free from the surveyor, holding the remote detonator aloft in his uninjured left hand. "If I don't own this valley, no one does!" he shrieked, and jammed his thumb down on the red toggle.
A deafening *CRACK* ripped through the cavern as the first set of demolition charges along the northern wall fired.
A slab of limestone the size of a two-story house sheared away from the ceiling, plummeting into the subterranean lake. A colossal wave of black water surged outward, sweeping across the gantry supports. The steel framework groaned, twisting like wire under the immense kinetic shock.
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The platform tilted violently. Julian lost his footing, his scream drowned out by the roar of falling rock as he slipped over the buckled railing, tumbling down into the swirling vortex of the whirlpool below. He disappeared beneath the foaming water without surfacing once.
The ceiling above the dais groaned. Massive boulders began to peel away, tumbling through the darkness.
