Soft blue-white eerie glow from the active Courtesy Arch header glyphs lit up the damp flat stone slabs of Sister Merrow’s back washroom. The small chamber smelled of steaming chicory tea, wet river slate, beeswaxed flax canvas, and the faint, crisp tang of Yorkshire rain drifting through the open brass frame. A heavy oak bench had been turned upside down over two ash blocks to form a sixteen-inch simulated tunnel across the floor.
In Harrowby, Jo Saye leaned close to the threshold frame with her steel tape and a notebook filled with cross-world pattern corrections. Her shoulders were stiff from leaning across the Courtesy Arch, speaking through the brass horn into Lathmere. On the Lathmere side of the line, Korr Var knelt at the mouth of the upturned bench wearing the completed Pattern Zero-One survey coat, its horsehide elbow cups and brass-and-leather spreading joints gleaming dull gold in the lantern light.
Validating the complete coat under a simulated crawlway load before Korr Var risked his life inside Sector 8’s live boiling bypass. Earlier that afternoon, they had tested the coat’s offering red warning thread on a wooden frame loaded with sandbags. Now Jo needed to observe and feel the live seam spreading across a moving human back.
