The first person they found had been holding a cup beneath a drip for so long that her fingers had cramped around it.
She did not drink when Eli’s lamp reached her. She pointed farther into the passage, toward the shape lying behind the fallen partition. One of the rescuers knelt beside her and gently took the cup. The water was going to someone who could not reach the drip herself.
The volunteer’s son stopped at the marked turn as promised. He recognized the woman with the cup and called her by name. Her face changed. She tried to get up, failed, and began to apologize for not reaching the place where they had arranged to meet.
He told her to stay still. His voice sounded almost angry because anything gentler would have broken.
Eli went past them with the transit worker. The partition had fallen across the route from the larger platform. People had gathered in the narrow pocket behind it, protected from one collapse and penned in by another. A low, intermittent light ran through a damaged junction mounted beside the wall. Each pulse made the loose frame above the partition tremble, then hold.
The second rescuer counted visible people while the first established who could move. The number changed when somebody answered from behind a stack of broken panels. Eli relayed a provisional count rather than letting the first one become official by repetition.
