Ivara Quill sat on the low stone coping of the pavilion wall, her single sound hand balancing her leather-bound transit notebook on her knee. Meanwhile, her apprentice, Danis, held the brass rule steady against the page.
Around the pavilion, three dozen surviving technicians, ward runners, and pump mechanics had gathered in small, quiet clusters out of the wind. They had unbuttoned their grease-stained coats to let the cool morning air reach their burns. But their attention was not on their bandages. Nearly every man and woman had their eyes cast downward. They stared at the faint, ghostly shimmer of their own internal advancement ledgers.
The expressions on their soot-streaked faces were not the triumphant grins of victorious soldiers. They were the tight, bitter, confused grimaces of creditors who had entered an insolvent bank and found the vault floor covered in dry lime.
Venn, the senior pump mechanic from the Quarry lower sump, leaned his broad back against a granite pilaster. His right hand gripped an oily iron wrench as if he might need to strike something. His left ear was a shriveled, scarred notch of joint padding. Torn away three years earlier during an emergency steam-pipe blow-out, an injury that had triggered his fifth milestone in air-powered valve-fitting.
