By half past ten on the twenty-seventh night, the forty-two evacuated families along Fish Street were safely back behind dry, shored walls, the carpentry crews had stacked their mallets in the yard. The workshop in Sister Merrow’s washroom was quiet. Before stepping out for the final night round, Pella Rook had inspected the charge bank gauge on the Courtesy Arch—now resting at nine point eight percent as the room cooled—and had pinned a signed notice across the brass uprights suspending all new cross-world signals until the matrix had been fully audited in daylight.
Pella walked alone down the quiet gravel path to the stone apron of the Ferry Turning Basin. She carried only a hooded tin lantern and her father’s brass measuring tongs in her apron pocket. The night air was crisp and clean, washed free of rotten-egg clay vapor for the first time in a month, and smelled of cold mountain snow-water, wet pine timber, and the salt marsh below the harbor.
She knelt at the edge of the granite weir doorstep where the excess flow of the Gray Rush glided smoothly over the oak stop-logs toward the estuary. Dipping her fingertips into the cold, dark current, she closed her eyes and listened—not projecting a summoner’s binding ring, not asking for a favor, and not straining her ears to carry the weight of the city alone.
