CHERRY WAS ANNOYED to discover no gas masks were available for entering the Chimera construction site. She’d assumed they would either be on site or easy to acquire quickly.
“Don’t the workers wear them routinely?” she asked the supervisor, whose name was Alun, glaring up at the tall, scrawny man. She was forced to raise her voice over the noise of the wind. “What about the risk of poisonous gases leaking from underground vents?” Cherry was no geologist, but even she knew of the dangers of entering unexplored subterranean regions. There had been a couple of incidents at the mountain mines where miners had been evacuated when methane had suddenly flooded an area.
“All our workers are protected in their cabs, ma’am,” Alun replied. “And all the vehicles carry sampling devices that sound an
