Water Hammer: A Factor of Safety Thriller

By Abir M

The pipe had been in the ground since 1891, and for most of that time it had
done nothing at all.

At twenty to five on a February morning, a Victorian water main lets go under
Thirlwell Street. Three metres of carriageway drop into a void that wasn't
there ninety seconds ago. A woman is pulled out alive at twenty to six, asking
where her daughter is.

The city decides it was the weather. Wharlton loses four hundred mains a year.
Hard winter, old iron, ground movement. Nobody's fault.

Ada Marram reads broken metal for a living. She is hired by the insurer - the
people who need this to be nobody's fault - and she goes to the yard where the
pipe is lying in nine pieces on a pallet, and she spends five hours on wet
concrete putting it back together, because a fragment on its own will tell you
any story you like.

Then she gets the callipers on the corrosion.

Thirty-one millimetres. Under the threshold. Well under. A patch that size
weeps for twenty years. It does not blow a hole in a trunk main and swallow a
car.

Something else supplied the energy.

Metal keeps the receipts. Break something in one go and it tears. Break it
slowly, over months, and it writes down every week of it in bands across the
fracture face - and when Ada finally gets this one under magnification, the
bands are there, and they are evenly spaced.

Nothing in a water network is evenly spaced. Not demand. Not weather. Not
ground.

Somebody has been doing this on a schedule.

She has no warrant, no powers, and a client who is paying her to conclude the
opposite. She has a second main somewhere in the city already most of the way
to failing, and no way to know which one. And she is about to learn that a
pressure wave cannot be stopped - only sent somewhere else.

WATER HAMMER is the first Factor of Safety thriller: a forensic investigator
with no authority, a city of held breath, and six ways for a system to kill the
people it was built to serve.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HKBNGSYJ
• ISBN13: 9798175259323
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 122 Pages
• Weight: 0.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.3" x 6.0"