Qinghe pinned a rest schedule beside the infirmary door. It was a simple list: no return to the furnace while a worker still had tremors, dizziness, or trouble breathing. The station master read it and shook his head.
“There is no rule requiring a pause between shifts.”
“There is also no rule requiring an exhausted crew to go back into the chamber,” Han said.
The barrier lamps needed power. Until the reserve cells were checked, Han ordered the lowest-priority lamps dimmed at dusk and rotated the guards. A shopkeeper offered oil lanterns for the market lane if the watch would walk through it after dark.
Yan sat with Lian and two operators over cups of tea. He asked what they felt before the tremor began. Lian heard a ringing in one ear. One operator’s fingers went numb. The other became suddenly thirsty.
“Is it always the same?” Yan asked.
“No,” Lian said. “That’s why the doctor asks us one at a time.”
Yan wrote the answers on separate slips. He wanted to find a pattern, but not by turning their different experiences into one story. Lian asked him to put his own fourth-minute tremor on the table too.
