The waystation had completely fallen into disorder.
In the southern coastal ruins, Gano's lottery platform collapsed at the same time.
The long-suppressed resentment there was even more direct and unvarnished than at the waystation. The lottery had always been a game of chance, and the invisible wall between those who won repeatedly and those who had never won had been worn thin as cicada wings by the friction of dried wooden slips. At last, someone could no longer bear it and tore it apart in one stroke.
Dom was still in the crowd, like a piece of driftwood swept up by the tide. He was neither knocked down nor overturned, only carried steadily toward the raised platform.
The young woman beside him shrieked, "Let us jump in! We'll jump in ourselves!"
Dom neither turned nor replied. He heard many people shouting the same words.
Their voices blended together like the roar of an underground river.
He shifted his gaze from the edge of the platform back to the enormous fissure hovering overhead. It resembled a half-open iron gate, narrow and deep, its vague outline traced by grayish-white light.
Within a quarter of an hour, the lottery platform in the dock district had been completely torn apart. Its stakes and crossbeams were kicked apart, trampled to pieces, and thrown into the standing water below.
Gano had left long ago. Halfway through the crowd surging onto the platform, his subordinates had dragged him away. Seizing one of his arms, they hauled and pulled him through the passage at the side of the platform.
He had tried to turn back for one last look at the lottery platform, but amid the chaos, a hand pressed down on his shoulder, and he saw nothing clearly.
At the rear, toward the harbor, people were still