Bram heard the answer before Eli heard the signal.
He raised a hand, and the party stopped between the pale walls. A sound came through the gate’s shifting distance: three short knocks, a pause, then a scrape too long to belong to the agreed pattern. One of the rescuers looked at Bram for a verdict.
“Again,” Bram called.
The answer came more slowly. The final scrape became a cough.
“That’s a person trying to knock,” Eli said.
“It doesn’t tell us which person.”
Bram gave the first half of the identification question. A woman’s voice answered with the right words in the wrong order, then swore and corrected herself. He looked at Eli.
“Exhausted,” he said. “Not disqualified.”
