Dima stood beside Jo behind the three-inch oak timber shield. He held his heavy tailor’s awl and a spool of four-ply tarred sailcloth thread. His knuckles were white, his forehead beaded with cold sweat. He watched the red seam of Sleeve Alpha bulge another half-inch into the void.
“Mistress Jo,” Dima pleaded, his voice shaking. “I have two minutes before the thread yields. I can reach the lower collar with the awl and run a double cross-stitch through the canvas. It will hold the pressure up to one hundred pounds!”
“No, Dima,” Jo answered, her voice quiet, steady, and unmoving as granite. “You’ll not put a single needle into that cloth.” She laid her hand over his spool, gently pushing the thread down into his basket. “In Harrowby, when young dressmakers make a formal ball gown, they think that making a seam twice as thick makes it twice as strong. But if a seam doesn’t yield when a woman sits down, the silk tears across the back and ruins the entire dress. Building isn’t about making things iron-hard. It’s about choosing where they break.”
“If that seam tears outward,” Jo explained, pointing to the empty expanse of the excavated mud basin below them, “the energy vents harmlessly into forty yards of river silt. If we reinforce it to a hundred pounds, the strain transfers upward into the stone mounting piers of the Third Gate. There, Pella and Ada are standing. We don’t save a twenty-shilling canvas sleeve at the cost…
