From her stance beside the heavy iron drop-gate, Ivara Quill watched the double with the cold and exact, unsparing calm distance of a land-mapper surveying a total collapse.
She didn’t curse. She didn’t reach for the empty leather holster at her belt. An engineer who had spent twelve years working beneath an unstable sky shield understood that moral outrage was an empty waste of dynamic energy. When a retaining wall snapped, you didn’t shout at the tumbling dark rock, you measured the angle of repose and determined how much earth remained before the foundations gave way entirely. Her breath was slow, measured, and cold, fogging the green twilight in rhythmic plumes.
Through the two-inch square upright bars, sixty yards of dark water separated them from the weir ledge.
The double stood bathed in the harsh, yellow glare of Captain Vance’s copper check lanterns. The spray from the main water chute formed a shimmering halo of sulfur mist around its head, but the creature didn’t flinch, didn’t shield its eyes, and didn’t brush the droplets from its woolen sleeves. It stood balanced on the narrow granite ledge with the total, zero-drag balance of Burdenless Step, its boots resting in the black silt as though anchored to the bedrock itself.
