Tool

Tool roared and lunged again, testing the chains, tearing at them. Military men flattened themselves against marbled columns and frescoed walls, eyes wide with fear. Tool strained to reach them and they shrank away, but the bonds held.

Tool lifted his hands to study the inch-thick iron that bound his wrists. More shackles clamped his ankles. All the chains were sunk deep into the floor.

The floor around him was covered with intricate colored tiles as ancient as the building that housed them, but here at his feet, there was new gray concrete. And his iron shackles were embedded in it.

Tool could sit or squat, but he could not rise to stand fully erect. He tested the chains again.

> > [...]

The concrete began to crack around his feet. Everyone stepped back, horrified. A few of the soldiers pulled out pistols and pointed them, but Glenn Stern just smiled and waved them off.

Tool bared his teeth and pulled harder, every tendon straining, muscles tearing. Concrete popped and cracked and turned to dust around the chains. Tool’s skin began to shred, but the manacles neither broke nor slipped.

Tool let himself relax and studied his bonds again. The chains weren’t only embedded in concrete; they seemed to be connected to something larger below, something stronger than stone.

“They’re looped around the steel beams of the basement supports,” the Colonel explained. “It took quite a lot of work to dig up all that stone and marble, but it seems that I anticipated you adequately.”

Page 389-390, Chapter 41, Drowned Cities