The wind blowing off the northern granite ridge was wet, dense with sulfur soot, and smelling of cold river mud. Beneath the rusted iron leg of the water tower, Ivara Quill knelt on one knee in the shadow of the dark rock retaining wall, unrolling a second linen diagram from her leather metal tube. Her single hand moved with clean, steady care, weighting the corners with three chipped paving stones she had picked from the gutter.
“Before we go down to the hospital gates,” Ivara said, her voice dropping into the quiet, steady beat she used when calibrating a sight transit, “you need to understand the man who signed that disposition slip. Not the monster that Doma talks about over the soup vats, and not the coward that Bram curses in his sleep. You need to understand the engineer.”
Len leaned his shoulder against the iron upright, his right hand resting on his sounding pole, his braced left forearm held tight against his ribs. “Morn was an engineer?”
“He was the chief high-pressure land-mapper for the Northern Basin before the sky went black,” Ivara said. She tapped the corner of the diagram with her thumbnail. “He designed the high-pressure weir gates at River Ward. He calculated the head loss across the central chimney pipes. The war engine came over the border twelve years ago. Then, it was Morn who drafted the emergency canopy specifications for the Provincial Council. He was thirty-five years old, brilliant, and utterly convinced that any physical…
