The quartz display on the Courtesy Bridge slate ticked down to four minutes and twelve seconds. To Pella Rook, whose entire adolescence had been shaped by the breathless panic of academic check deadlines. It rose river tides. The constant terror of academy court guards battering down the ward gates with iron rams, four minutes was a terrifyingly narrow window that demanded instant, wild physical hard effort. The baked-clay gallery beneath the floor was leaking forty-pound steam. The mortar was crumbling. Eren Tal was standing fully suited in his newly heavy reed smock. He smelled of boiled soda and bees wax. Every single second spent standing idle felt like an unpardonable backstabbing of the Lowbank ward.
‘Jo,’ Pella said, stepping toward the breach in the larder wall with her brass hardened carbon-iron lamp burning bright, her voice high and taut with urgency. ‘We have four minutes left on your crossing! If we open the timber inner wall now, you can inspect the live draft while Eren crawls through! You can see how the shingled vents exhaust the steam plume before the arch timer pulls you back! We have to move right now!’
Jo Saye didn’t move toward the dark breach. She didn’t even look at the jagged brick opening where hot rotten-egg steam curled in lazy white plumes. Instead, she walked with deliberate, unrushed steps across the back kitchen flat stone slabs to the low, three-legged cobbler’s stool sitting beside Sister Merrow’s hearth. She smoothed her navy-blue pleated skirt beneath her thighs, sat down with her back against the warm brick chimney breast. Then she unclipped her small leather handbag. From the bag, she withdrew a small parcel wrapped in clean greaseproof paper, neatly folded into a crisp triangle. With slow, careful care, she peeled back the paper corners to reveal two spotless halves of an egg-and-cress sandwich, cut into clean sharp-angled triangles on soft white crustless bread.
Pella stopped dead, staring at the sandwich in utter confusion. ‘Jo! The clock is running! You have four minutes before the sovereign recall activates! The drain tube is boiling! Lowbank is under quarantine! Why are you unwrapping an egg sandwich?!’
Jo took a neat, modest bite of the sandwich, chewed it thoroughly, swallowed. Then he dabbed her lip with a clean linen handkerchief before speaking. ‘Because, Pella Rook, my work order from the Harrowby Trade Registry specifies twenty-two minutes of authorized crossing time. That crossing time includes my forced mid-shift nutritional recess. It doesn’t specify twenty-two minutes of unceasing unpaid labor. A tea break that doesn’t permit you to sit down and chew your sandwich is not a break. It’s an overtime shift without wages, and I don’t work for free for anyone, not even an empire in trouble.’
Dima Fen stood by the dough bench. His wire glasses shook so wildly they nearly dropped into his basket of flax thread. ‘Madame!’ the old tailor cried, his voice squeaking in dramatic horror. ‘The High Siphon has mobilized two sapper regiments! Iron rams are crossing the High Walkway! The river spirit is howling in the channels beneath our feet! How can a civilized artisan sit on a three-legged stool and chew boiled eggs. Meanwhile, the very foundations of the city are fracturing?!’
Jo lifted a tin mug of hot black tea that Sister Merrow had placed on the hearthstone, blew across the steaming rim. Then she took a measured sip. ‘Mr. Fen, I have lived through three national railway strikes, two economic depressions. A winter cholera epidemic that closed every shop on Harrowby High Street for two months. In my experience, politicians and guildmasters always discover an existential emergency right around twelve-thirty in the afternoon, because declaring a crisis is cheaper than paying workers their lunchtime premium. If a seamstress drops her shears and runs about shouting every time a man screams that the sky is falling, she sews crooked hems and drives needles through her own thumbs. A crisis is merely poor management shouting at people who do real work.’
Sister Merrow leaned her wide shoulders against the pantry doorframe, her heavy iron soup ladle resting against her apron. A deep, rumbling laugh, dry as river gravel, broke from the old nurse’s chest. ‘Listen to the woman, Pella. She’s giving you forty years of wisdom for the price of a cup of tea. I was tending the wounded during the Siege of Black Basin. Then, the young ensigns used to run into the surgery tents shrieking that the enemy had breached the stronghold. You know what the old surgeons did? They sat on salt-pork barrels and ate their cold mutton pies. You know why? Because a surgeon with low blood sugar cuts the wrong artery. You eat when the food is on your plate, girl. That was because in five minutes you might be carrying a stretcher through knee-deep mud.’
Jo pointed the crust of her sandwich toward the wall. There, the Courtesy Bridge slate hummed with its soft, unchanging amber soft glow.
‘Look at that fifth line on the slate, Pella,’ Jo said, taking another calm bite. ‘Work Prohibited During Recess. That isn’t a rule I invented. That was chiseled into the brass matrix by whoever drafted your bridge charter five hundred years ago. The people who built that arch understood human nature. They knew that if an apprentice or a journeyman is allowed to work through her rest, the master will soon expect her to do it every day. Within a generation, you have slaves who think tiredness is a virtue. A trade without boundaries is just tyranny with nice manners.’
Pella looked from the ticking quartz clock to Jo’s calm, steady eyes, and then down at her own hands. For the first time all day, she noticed how hard her fingers were trembling. Her knuckles were bruised and scraped from prying the larder timbers loose, her palms were stained with coal dust and sulfur. Her stomach felt like a hollow iron drum. She hadn’t eaten a bite of solid food since Sister Merrow’s bowl of bitter chicory porridge at dawn. Her wild desire to rush Eren into the boiling breach was not heroism. It was body tiredness masquerading as working necessity.
Slowly, deliberately, Pella lowered the hardened carbon-iron lamp onto the bench. She walked to the hearth, drew a deep breath of the warm, tea-scented air. Then she sat down on a low wooden firing block. ‘You’re right, Jo,’ Pella said softly, rubbing her eyes with the back of her grimy wrist. ‘I was about to push Eren into that dark hole before he even had a chance to drink a cup of cold well-water.’
Jo finished the first half of her egg sandwich, carefully folded the greaseproof paper over the leftover triangle. Then it tucked it back into her handbag. ‘There is a time for digging, Pella, and there is a time for chewing. If you mix the two together, you do neither well.’ She stood up, brushed three stray crumbs from her pleated skirt. Then she took her yellow spun-glass measuring tape from her neck, winding it into a neat, three-inch coil around her fingers. ‘Two minutes leftover. That’s enough time to pack my bag, rinse my fingers in your basin, and give you your final marching orders.’
She stepped to the stone washbasin, washed her hands thoroughly with yellow carbolic soap. Then she dried them on her stitched handkerchief. She picked up her brown leather Gladstone bag, checking the brass clasps. ‘Eren, you listen to me. When you crawl into that pipe, you watch your elbows. If you hit a low header, don’t hunch your shoulders. Drop your hips and slide. The reed will take the scrape, but your collarbones won’t. Dima, you have the master patterns pinned to the bench. If you cut the next six suits on the true bias, Lowbank will have a working crew before sunset. Don’t let those drainers talk you into using dry reed. Soda-boil every single bundle.’
Dima bowed from the waist, his velvet cap clutched against his chest. ‘On my honor as a River Tailor, Madame. The soda vats are already heating.’
The quartz slate countdown hit 0m 30s. Then, Jo Saye walked calmly to the threshold plate between the bronze uprights of the Courtesy Arch. The silver ring of light around her right wrist flared with a clean, steady bright glare, acknowledging the sovereign completion of her contract.
‘Good luck with your pipe, Pella,’ Jo said, a warm, genuine smile crinkling the corners of her eyes. ‘Tell Ada I said hello when she logs her evening audio call. And remember: eat your dinner before you swing your hammer.’
She stepped backward through the shimmering oval of amber light. The threshold closed behind her with the soft, clean whisper of a heavy linen curtain falling against a window frame. The amber portal vanished, the back kitchen went quiet, and on the scrubbed pine bench, the completed reed steam suit lay ready for the dark.