The pipe split while Iven Marr was arguing about his wages.
It opened along a seam above the bathhouse door, a bright little mouth in the iron. Iven saw the white thread of escaping water before he heard it. He dropped the invoice, caught the boy walking beneath it by his collar, and threw them both behind a stone trough.
Steam struck the street hard enough to peel paint.
For a moment the world consisted of the boy’s elbow in his stomach and the smell of boiled cabbage. Someone screamed. The invoice drifted past on a current of scalding water, carrying away six days of unpaid work.
“You could have asked,” the boy said.
“Would you have moved?”
“Depends what you offered.”
Brin Cal had acquired a new scrape across his chin and a parcel under his coat. Neither was surprising. What concerned Iven was the pipe above them. The jet had weakened. That should have been encouraging. Instead, the nearest pressure gauge swung backward until its needle pressed against the lower stop.
The pipe gave a deep, hollow knock.
“Get Asa,” Iven said. “Tell her the Lower Return is drawing backward. Tell her to clear the bathhouse.”
Brin crawled to the trough’s far end. “Is that bad?”
“It’s a novelty. I don’t recommend staying to appreciate it.”
The boy ran. Iven waited for the jet to falter again, sprang across the wet paving, and hauled himself onto the valve ladder. His work boots slipped. He caught a rung with his right hand and struck his left shoulder against hot iron.
Below, a woman was trying to recover a basket of clean washing from the flood. He shouted at her to leave it. She looked up with an expression that suggested he had offered to replace the week’s wages it represented.
Then the bathhouse windows blew inward.
She abandoned the basket.
Iven reached the wheel and tested it with both hands. It turned a quarter rotation too freely. The spindle had sheared inside the housing. He could have stood there spinning it until winter.
Above the roofline, the city carried on with its morning. A freight bell rang somewhere in the next saddle. The market awnings shook in the steady wind off Mercy’s flank. Far beyond them, upper terraces caught the pale sun. Smoke from breakfast kitchens rose against the enormous ridges of the creature’s back.
One of those ridges moved.
The ladder shivered under Iven’s feet as Mercy took another of its slow steps. Everyone in Rung Ward leaned almost imperceptibly with the movement. A lifetime aboard made the adjustment unconscious. Today the tremor found the broken pipe, and the split widened with a sound like cloth tearing.
Iven wedged his spanner through the ladder and flattened himself against the wall.
A second burst of water ripped the top rung away.
It hit the street where he had been standing less than a minute before.
Asa Pell came around the corner carrying a bread paddle.
“People!” she shouted. “Move your feet, you can discuss the inconvenience somewhere dry!”
She used the paddle to knock a window open, then shoved its handle inside for someone to catch. Two bathhouse attendants helped an old man over the sill. He had emerged with his boots in one hand and nothing else. Asa stripped a tablecloth off a deserted stall and passed it up without breaking her stride.
“Which end?” she asked Iven.
“Neither. Broken spindle.”
“Tell me something useful.”
He looked toward the low arch at the end of the street. Beyond it, Rung Gate separated the ward from the principal lift galleries. The gate’s counterweights were descending.
“Get everyone through there.”
Asa followed his gaze. “That’s closing.”
“Yes.”
“They’re supposed to sound the warning.”
The ward bell stood above the old maintenance chapel. Its bronze body was visible through the steam, still and silent beneath a crooked roof.
“I noticed.”
She swore with feeling and went to meet the crowd.
Iven pulled his spanner free. He could not isolate the branch at this valve. The next one stood inside the bathhouse basement, beneath the flooded floor. That left the return bypass in the service passage. Reaching it would take him away from the gate.
He looked down at the street, counting without meaning to: three attendants, the washing woman, the old man, two children on the steps. More people were coming out of homes farther downhill, where the hot water was collecting.
He had enough time to get himself out.
He climbed down toward the basement.
Inside the bathhouse, overturned benches floated against the bathing partitions. The warmth had become oppressive. He wrapped his coat around his right hand and used it to open the service hatch.
Hot air pushed against his face. The ladder below disappeared into brown water.
He lowered the folding gauge on its cord. Eight feet to the surface. The bypass sat nine feet down.
“Of course,” he said.
He found the bathhouse keeper trying to hold a door closed against the rising water.
“Your cleaning pole.”
“What?”
“Long wood thing. You’ve threatened me with it twice.”
She pointed behind him. Iven snatched it from its hooks, cut a strip from the ruined hem of his coat, and lashed the spanner to its end. He lowered the improvised tool into the hatch and hunted for the square bypass head by touch.
Above him, something heavy rolled across the roof.
The keeper looked up.
“Go,” he told her.
“My till—”
“Is wet. You’re still breathing. Keep that advantage.”
She hesitated, then left through the broken window.
The spanner found metal. Iven braced the pole against the hatch frame and pushed. Nothing moved. He adjusted the angle, planted a boot against a bolt, and leaned until the wood bowed.
The valve turned.
Water surged up around the pole. A noise traveled through the floorboards, low and ugly. The pressure gauge outside stopped trying to tear its needle free.
Iven allowed himself one breath of relief.
Then all the lamps went out.
The bathhouse’s heat exchangers stopped humming. From the street came a change in the crowd’s voice, individual alarm joining into something wider. He dragged the pole up. The spanner remained attached. A small mercy, aboard the large one.
He climbed through the window into a different morning.
The main jet had stopped. The broken pipe spat fitfully into the gutter. But the warm draft that usually came from the street vents was gone, and gray vapor was rising from the deep drainage grilles.
Rung Gate was halfway down.
At its far side, a guard stood behind a chain barrier with a speaking horn.
“Heat isolation order! Clear the return galleries! Upper circulation takes priority until the fault is secured!”
“We’re trying to clear them!” Asa shouted back. “Lift the gate!”
Iven ran toward her. The paving flexed beneath his boots; beneath that, deeper still, Mercy’s living bulk rolled into its next step.
He passed Mother Vale’s kitchen. Two volunteers were carrying a man in a chair while Vale pushed folded blankets into their arms. Steam had silvered the old woman’s hair.
“How many inside?” he asked.
“In the ward? You want a guess or an argument?”
“The people who can’t walk.”
“Eleven I know of. Send another cart.”
He nodded and kept running.
The barrier had turned a working street into a funnel. Residents carrying children and bundles pressed toward the shrinking space beneath the gate. Asa had placed three overturned benches across the approach to stop the first row from crushing those ahead. Brin was directing people through one gap at a time.
The guard’s name, stitched above his breastplate, was Sann. He looked older than his voice, with a bitten thumbnail resting against the speaking horn.
Iven caught his eye through the gate.
“The Lower Return has reversed. Isolation won’t hold the ward. You have to open the north feed.”
“I have orders to shut this line.”
“Then your orders were written before the pipe broke.”
Sann glanced behind him. Two other guards were working the chain housing. Neither looked pleased to be there.
“Who’s your board supervisor?”
Iven felt the old answer rise in his throat.
Olan Reeve. Sixth Lift maintenance. Sign here, Marr. Gauge is wrong, you know those gauges. You want everyone sitting unpaid until some terrace inspector comes down?
Nine names, afterward.
“I work contract,” he said. “Look at the drain.”
Sann did. Vapor was thickening around their feet.
“That’s sump gas,” Iven said. “The reverse flow has pulled the wet seals out. Your isolation draws it up here.”
“We can send for a board man.”
“You can send for whoever you like. Lift the gate while he walks.”
The gate descended another foot.
Asa caught the back of a woman’s coat before she ducked beneath it. A loose basket broke apart against the iron teeth. Apples rolled through to the other side.
“Stop that chain!” Sann shouted.
One guard threw his weight against the control lever. It rebounded, striking him in the chest. The chain kept moving.
Iven dropped to his knees beside the housing on his side. The inspection plate had four screws. One had rusted through. He removed the other three with his awl and fingers, cutting a knuckle on the edge.
Inside, the governor drum was turning without the release arm engaged.
He understood the fault at once. The control line had lost power. The gate was closing under its own counterweights, and the manual brake had been kept disengaged with a bent copper wedge.
Someone’s cheap solution to a sticking ratchet.
He dragged the wedge out. The brake fell into place with a sharp clack.
The gate stopped three feet above the paving.
The crowd cheered. Iven put his hand flat against the drum and felt it shudder under the load.
The cheer died when the brake began shedding teeth.
A cart struck the overturned benches. One of Vale’s kitchen volunteers was pushing it, his face red with effort. The man on the cart lay with his knees drawn up, breathing through a little brass inhaler. Beside him a boy kept telling him a story about a dog, starting again whenever the coughing interrupted.
Iven knew the man. He sharpened kitchen knives in the square on rest days and refused payment from anyone who brought him something to eat.
“That cart won’t fit,” Asa said.
“Lift the front wheels,” Iven told Brin. “Pass him sideways. Keep his head higher than his chest.”
Sann handed his speaking horn to the other guard and knelt to help. For thirty seconds there were no orders, only hands finding a grip, someone counting, the boy still talking about his dog. The man’s breath rattled against the paving. They got him through without losing the inhaler.
More carts waited behind him.
“The service stairs?” Asa asked quietly.
“Their bottom landing is under the bathhouse.”
She looked at his wet coat and understood. “The roofs, then.”
“We can get Brin over a roof. We can’t get him.” He nodded toward the sick man. “And three streets uphill those roofs end at an open freight drop.”
Asa lifted a broken basket out of the way. She was looking at the crowd with a food seller’s practiced attention, finding those who needed help before they asked. When she turned back, the questions had left her face.
“Find another way,” she said.
“It won’t hold,” he said.
Brin crouched beside him. “How long?”
Iven watched a bright sliver of steel drop into the housing.
“Don’t make me lie to you.”
He crawled under the gate and stood on the gallery side. Asa shoved a bundle into his arms.
“Take him.”
Inside was a little girl with a knitted cap pulled over both eyes. She clung to his collar. Iven handed her to Sann, who accepted her automatically, speaking with sudden awkward gentleness.
“Keep passing people,” Iven said. “Use the gap.”
“And when it drops?” Asa asked.
He looked up the gallery. The old College workshop occupied the next landing, beyond a locked grille. A ceramic charger sat in its front window beside a rack of precision tools. Behind the counter, in the display cabinet, three glass vessels held pale cultivated filaments.
Restorers’ grafts.
He had repaired the cabinet’s locking mechanism last winter. The College had paid on time. He remembered that because nobody else had.
One of those grafts had a chipped transfer collar and a red strip marking it for disposal. He had watched a licensed restorer use its twin to draw a broken crane arm back into place without touching the load.
Enough force to hold a brake. Enough sound to reach the upper galleries, if he could make the ward bell work.
The drum behind him lost another tooth.
“Marr,” Sann said. “Where are you going?”
Iven looked at the child in the guard’s arms, then at the locked workshop.
“To find someone qualified.”
He took his spanner out of his coat.