The College workshop had left its lights on when it evacuated.
That annoyed Iven more than the locked door. Someone was paying to heat the immaculate tile behind the grille while the ward below filled with sump gas. He considered making a note on the invoice he no longer possessed.
The first blow of his spanner knocked the inspection cap off the door lock.
“You can hear that from the gate,” Brin said behind him.
“Then go tell them it’s a repair.”
“Is it?”
“It’s an improvement in accessibility.”
He had told the boy to stay with Asa. Brin had evidently interpreted this as permission to follow until explicitly prevented. He held a cloth over his mouth now, the medicine parcel still tucked against his ribs.
Iven hooked a finger inside the exposed lock and felt for the spring he had replaced last winter. A good installation. He regretted that. It would have been much easier to break if the College had hired someone cheaper.
From below came the screech of the gate brake slipping.
He drove the spanner into the lock case and levered. Metal tore out of the frame. The grille swung toward them, and Brin caught it before it could strike the wall.
The room smelled of oil, antiseptic, and the orange peels someone had dried on the heater. Three worktables stood in a row under inspection lamps. A slate above the counter listed outstanding commissions. Half were household conveniences for upper-terrace addresses: a warming cabinet, a fountain regulator, a dumbwaiter for a man who could have carried his own lunch upstairs.
On the side door, a notice gave the explanation Iven had been looking for.
ALL LICENSED PERSONNEL TO FORWARD CIRCULATION STATION. TEMPORARY CLOSURE.
“They left us,” Brin said.
“They’re at a fault.”
“We’re at a fault.”
Iven could not improve on that assessment.
He went behind the counter. The glass cabinet was locked, but its hinges had external pins. He tapped them free with the hammer and lifted the door away whole. He was beginning to understand why thieves looked so cheerful in street plays.
Up close, the cultivated grafts looked less like supernatural power than neglected soup. Pale strands floated in clear fluid, branching from thicker central stems. Each vessel had a transfer collar and a set of waxed leads. Labels listed charge capacity, cultivation date, and inspection approval.
The two sound specimens were sealed behind separate metal shutters.
The condemned one was not.
Iven took its inspection card. RETURN ROOT SEVERED. TRANSFER VIABLE. INCONSISTENT RESONANT FEEDBACK. DISPOSAL PENDING RECONCILIATION.
“Does condemned mean it’s cheaper?” Brin asked.
“It means they were going to throw it away after getting three people to agree.”
“Were they close?”
Only one signature occupied the card.
“We’ve saved it a long wait.”
Iven set the vessel on the worktable. He had watched installations before. Twice when carrying tools for a restorer, once through a clinic window because he was fifteen and the sight had seemed worth missing lunch. There was no great incision, no replacing a heart. A graft joined through the forearm, its branches settling against the host’s existing tissue. The practitioner guided it with a cultivated transfer collar.
Every installation he had seen involved someone who knew what they were doing.
He found the workshop’s instruction drawer and opened it.
Brin had gone quiet.
“Don’t stand behind me like that,” Iven said.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re at a funeral deciding if there’ll be food.”
The boy stepped beside him instead. On the table lay several printed transfer diagrams. They specified trained assistance, sterile instruments, and supervision by a licensed practitioner. Iven read those lines, then the practical instructions beneath them.
Below the workshop, the gate chains rattled again.
He took off his coat.
“Go back,” he told Brin. “Take the two long bracing bars from that rack. Tell Sann to put them beneath the gate, on blocks, not straight against the paving. It needs to spread the load.”
“What about you?”
“I’m trying something unpleasant.”
“I could help.”
Iven looked at him properly. Seventeen, full of sharp bones and unspent objections. The parcel under his coat smelled faintly of cloves. Someone in the ward needed what was inside it.
“You can help me get those bars down the stairs,” he said. “I can’t carry them while I do this.”
That was a task Brin could accept. He dragged the bars out one at a time, promising to return. Iven let him believe the promise might matter.
When the boy was gone, he read the card again.
Transfer viable.
He laid out the items from the installation tray, comparing them to the drawings. He did not use the narrow instrument whose purpose he could not identify. He discarded a cracked coupling. An alcohol bottle had been left uncapped; he chose a sealed one from the drawer instead.
The small decisions steadied him. They were familiar even here. Know what a part does. Look at it before putting weight on it. Never believe a reassuring label over the thing in front of you.
That last principle had arrived in his life too late.
He set his left forearm into the transfer cradle.
The cradle did not close.
He checked the collar, then the coupling, then the diagram again. A small transit pin remained through the lower catch. It was painted the same white as the surrounding frame. He pulled it out and found a second label folded around it.
PROPERTY TRANSFER MUST BE RECORDED BEFORE ACTIVATION.
“You should put that on the front,” he told it.
He could hear Brin arguing below, although not the words. Iven rose, went to the window, and saw a guard reaching for one of the bracing bars. Brin stood between them, refusing to move. Then Sann pointed to the next cart in the queue and the argument ended. They needed the bar. Everyone could see they needed it.
That was the trouble with a simple emergency. People still brought all their previous arrangements to it.
The old College tuition chart hung beside the window. Iven had studied it once, calculating what he could save if he stopped paying rent and developed an indifference to food. Several people in Rung Ward called him too clever to remain there. None had ever explained where cleverness could be exchanged for the admissions deposit.
He turned away from the chart. Whatever this graft did to him, it would not teach him what the College taught. He still needed to learn. He still needed someone who could identify the instrument he had put aside.
But he could start.
He tried the catch again. This time the transfer cradle closed around his arm with a small, decisive click.
An inspection lamp changed from blue to amber. The graft in its vessel slowly contracted, gathering its branches toward the collar. Iven watched it move with the horrible fascination he usually reserved for a crack extending through loaded glass.
At the bottom of the diagram someone had written a note in cramped pencil: If subject reports numb fingers, release proximal tension before proceeding.
Not even a printed warning. A practitioner remembering a patient, leaving the next person something useful.
Iven adjusted the cradle until his little finger stopped tingling.
“Thank you,” he said to the absent stranger, and settled back against the cradle.
The collar tightened when he opened the vessel’s lower seal. Something cold touched his skin, followed by an unpleasant sensation like a sleeping hand waking inside his arm. The fluid in the vessel sank. Fine pale strands gathered at its neck.
He had intended to remain perfectly still.
His body offered a different opinion.
He caught the table edge with his right hand and concentrated on the bolted joints beneath it. Four bolts. Two cross braces. A foot adjusted badly enough that the whole table rocked when he clenched his fingers.
He could fix that foot in less than a minute.
The thought was so ordinary that he almost laughed.
Then the graft joined him, and every object on the table seemed to acquire a second shape.
Not light. Not a picture. He felt the hammer as an unfinished proposition, a weight with somewhere to go. The heater’s vibration came through the cradle into his bones. For one terrifying instant he could not tell the movement of the building from the movement of his own pulse.
He made himself breathe out.
The sensation settled.
Under the skin of his left forearm, a pale branching line curved toward his wrist. It was smaller than he had expected. He could have covered most of it with his thumb.
He had imagined power would feel louder.
His arm was warm. His hand was shaking. The hammer remained a hammer.
“Fine,” he whispered. “We can start with that.”
He released the transfer cradle. The collar withdrew, leaving a red ring and a smear of clear fluid. He bound the forearm with a clean strip from the tray, pulled on his coat, and pocketed the inspection card.
The papers told him he should rest for several hours.
He closed the drawer carefully. There was no reason to let useful instructions become a tripping hazard.
At the door he stopped, went back, and took the condemned vessel’s matching coupling kit. He left the two sound grafts locked behind their shutters. Other people would need them. So would he, if this attempt ended with someone trying to keep him alive.
He wrote his name on the commission slate beneath the unpaid fountain regulator.
IVEN MARR. EMERGENCY USE OF CONDEMNED STOCK. RUNG GATE.
It was a ridiculous time to develop a respect for receipts.
Outside, cold air struck his damp shirt. His first step almost pitched him down the stairs. The graft made him aware of how much the landing moved, minute shifts he had spent his life ignoring. He gripped the rail until the sensation steadied.
Below, Brin and Sann had wedged the bracing bars beneath the gate.
One had bowed.
People still crawled through the gap. Mother Vale’s second cart had reached the benches. Asa was holding a woman who kept trying to run back toward the flooded street.
“My father’s room,” the woman was saying. “He can’t hear. He won’t know.”
Iven reached the chain housing and put his left hand against it.
He waited.
The drum’s pressure pressed into his palm. He understood the direction of the load, the broken brake, the teeth trying to hold it. But the graft offered him no grip on that force. He could not simply command the machine to work.
He had repaired nothing here. He had only exposed the fault.
“Do it,” Sann said.
Iven looked up.
The guard had seen the pale lines at his cuff.
“Whatever you came back to do. I can hear that bar going.”
Iven took his hand away.
He had watched restorers for years. A repaired component, then a test, then the astonishing borrowed function. He had skipped the essential part in his hurry to believe he could save everyone.
He needed something he could make work.
The brake was beyond a patch. A replacement would require taking the counterweight load off the drum, which was the very thing he could not do. The broken valve spindle lay under a street now full of gas. The workshop had no open path into the ward except the gate beneath his feet.
Across the steam, the silent bell stood above the maintenance chapel.
If the upper galleries heard the ward’s emergency sequence, they would send cages to the roof gantry. The roof gantry could be reached from inside. It did not need the gate.
Brin followed his stare.
“That bell’s been broken all season.”
“Then it’s available.”
“You can’t reach the frame. The stair’s gone.”
“The stair is unsatisfactory. Gone would be a different price.”
He crouched beneath the gate. Sann caught his sleeve.
“You’re on the safe side.”
The guard said it quietly, as a piece of information a distracted man might have missed.
Iven could see the girl in the knitted cap farther up the gallery. She was sitting beside the sick knife sharpener. The boy with the dog story had found her and was telling it again.
He could stay with them. The graft was stolen. The danger inside the ward was now an emergency for officials with salaries and better boots.
Asa looked through the gap at him. She did not ask.
Iven pulled his sleeve free.
“When you get a cage,” he told Sann, “send it to the chapel.”
He slid under the gate.
The bowed brace broke as he stood up.
Asa shoved Brin away from the teeth. Iven caught the woman still calling for her father and dragged her clear. Iron hit stone with a force he felt in his knees.
On the far side, someone shouted his name.
The gate was down.
Iven rested his palm against it once, then turned toward the chapel.
“All right,” he said to the little warmth under his skin. “Now we do the work.”