On the framed slate board mounted beside the Courtesy Arch in the boatwright’s staging shed, the chalk runes snapped into three separate, independent countdown columns, each glowing with faint emerald eerie glow in the dim air.
Each column was headed with a worker’s name, their home origin in Harrowby. A precise numerical countdown that began at ninety minutes and zero seconds:
ADA MORLAND [PLUMBING] — 90m 00s JO SAYE [TAILORING] — 90m 00s IMRAN BELL [PEST MANAGEMENT] — 90m 00s
The overtime clause had been engaged under the full legal provisions of the Courtesy Charter. It wasn’t an open-ended emergency concession. It didn’t permit Pella Rook to hold the specialists in Lathmere until they collapsed from tiredness. The ninety minutes represented sixty-six minutes of piled up overtime reserve earned through three weeks of paid commercial repairs, added to the twenty-four minutes of their voluntary lunch breaks. Every second was tracked, every minute was accounted for, and when those chalk runes reached zero, the arch would pull the workers back across the threshold whether the river was defeated or not.
Kel Dorr knelt beside the slate board with an ink horn and three brass measuring tongs. Meanwhile, Corvin Hest sat on an upturned nail keg, his pocket turnip watch open in his palm.
