Chalk dust hung in the pale gray light that angled across the six-foot slate blackboard on Sister Merrow’s back kitchen wall. The room carried the sharp tang of red grease pencil, wet wool, sheep fat, and the damp limestone sweat of the lower river ward. Across the dark stone surface, four neat columns of figures recorded every measurement taken since the first warm slow leak had appeared in the Silt Gallery fourteen days ago.
Her jaw muscles tightened, her fingers curling into fists inside her apron pockets as Sorell pointed toward the chalkboard. Pella kept her wooden ruler and Hal’s brass measuring tongs pressed against her thigh. In the third column of the blackboard, written in Auditor Varo Nenn’s precise, slant-ribbed archival script, sat the midnight-to-dawn pressure variances from the Sluice Crown’s backup relief header. Matched line by line against Imran Bell’s lantern-beetle escape heights and Dima Fen’s leather seal ring squeezing tests.
Sorell demanded the immediate physical destruction of the washroom chalk slates as a precondition of her return. Sorell rose from the three-legged stool. That left his silver pool pen on the bread board, and walked three paces toward the wall.
Pella stepped between Sorell and the chalkboard. Her body formed a physical barrier before the recorded tracking data. With her gaze and her resolute stance, Pella defended fourteen days of checked pressure logs, sound intervals, and stoker depositions recorded on the slate. The data on that board was the only existing record of the Crown’s underground heat…
