Sister Merrow stood before the brass arch. She held the small iron key that locked the three emergency locked deposit silver coins inside their protective compartment. She looked at Pella, then at Korr Var, her gaze sharp, fierce, and entirely uncompromising.
‘Listen to me, both of you,’ Merrow said. Her voice dropped into the solemn register of a woman who had buried forty watermen during her thirty years in Lowbank. ‘These three silver coins are not for fixing pipes. They’re not for pleasing the Council, and they’re not for proving that Hal Rook was right. These coins are the price of bringing you and those foreign children back alive if the mountain gives way.’
She tapped the iron key against the brass frame of the arch. ‘If I stand at this washroom door tomorrow and see the floodwater rising past the third step, or if Imran’s slate tells me the vault heat has crossed fifty degrees, I’m turning this key and triggering the extraction recall. I don’t care if the gate is half-open or the wrench is on the bolt. You come back through that door, or I will come down into that pit with an iron ladle and drag you out myself.’
