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of wall are missing where fixtures have been torn out.
    Aiah wets a finger, holds it up. No obvious air currents: the pneuma line is probably sealed off farther down the track. She slowly walks the length of the platform, examining everything carefully in the light of her torch.
    She stops, redirects the light. Her heart lurches.
    There’s a streak of reddish dust floating down the length of one of the station’s support stanchions. She looks closer, sees that powdery rusted iron seems to have migrated to the surface of the stanchion, pooled around the clawed feet, overrunning the asbestos pad and pointing straight across the platform.
    Electrolytic deposition. Sometimes this happens if there’s an electric current in an atmosphere heavy with electrolytes, but that water spilling down the stair was fresh, not salt. Hairs rise on the back of Aiah’s neck.
    Connections. What is that stanchion trying to connect itself to?
    She flicks the light from the stanchion across the platform, sees a doorway. The door has long been removed, and there’s a little gnomon in the doorframe where a lock was once placed. Her heart is in her throat. She walks to the doorway, flashes her light in.
    It was a public toilet. The fixtures and even the pipe have been removed, leaving gaping holes in the walls and floor. There’s been a cave-in — an old L-shaped iron brace has fallen through the roof, probably in an earthquake, and now lies cantwise along the length of the room.
    Aiah approaches hesitantly, pans her light along the room.
    Empty eye-sockets stare back at her. Aiah’s throat clamps shut in terror and suddenly she can’t breathe. Something — pulse probably — crashes in her ears. The room swims in front of her. She leans against the doorway for support.
    The burning woman. She remembers the terror-filled face, humanity consumed in flames. The plasm exploded through the woman’s mind, and though it soon had a mind of its own it retained the diver’s pattern.
    She takes a long series of deep breaths and steps forward, tottering on her heavy boots. She tries to focus her mind on theory, on a scientific theory of what’s happened here. Earthquake drops brace, disrupting the plasm well. The quake probably caused enough damage to the mains and meters above so that a small amount of missing plasm wasn’t detected.
    The plasm had been building for years, most likely, till one lone plasm diver found it and triggered a blowhole that exploded through her body and brain and ran amuck in the world outside.
    As she approaches the beam Aiah tries to keep her eyes away from the corpse, from what the plasm has done to it. There’s probably a small amount of plasm collected here since the catastrophe, most likely a detectable amount. She unhooks the portable meter from her belt, connects an alligator clip to the brace, focuses her helmet light on the dial, and watches wide-eyed as the needle almost leaps off the logarithmic scale.
    For a moment she’s aware of nothing but the pounding of her own pulse. The plasm well is brimming over and immeasurably powerful, fully capable of burning every nerve in her body if she’s careless.
    It’s not a one-time thing. She’s found a glory hole, a lost well worth millions. That old plastics factory, all the iron and steel in its foundation, and who knows what that’s connected to besides the pneuma station.
    With trembling hands she pulls the alligator clip off the brace, then gropes her way back to the door, trying to keep her eyes off the body. Once outside on the platform, she leans her back against one of the torn walls and tries to collect her breath, her thoughts.
    The burning woman stalks through her mind. Her shrieks echo in Aiah’s ears. Some time later she hears the clump of boots, sees lights dancing in the entrance tunnel. She begins walking toward her team. A torch dazzles her, and she raises a hand to block the light.
    “Anything?” Grandshuk's voice booms loud in the empty