Kesh refused the chair for nearly a minute.
Sera waited with her arms folded while she tested her injured knee against the floor. She took one step, paused, and sat down without being told a second time.
“An excellent decision,” Sera said.
“I was already making it.”
“I could see that. Slowly.”
The clinic had no room for the entire expedition at once. Pellan took the recovered drill frame to the maintenance board, Elian went with him to ensure the altered route was recorded, and Tavin carried Kesh up the stairs only after Kesh had attempted to climb them herself. Iven stayed because Sera wanted to examine the scrape on his forearm and because his coat had torn badly enough to reveal the bandage beneath it.
The repaired return loop had held during the fight. That was the first thing he told her.
“The skin around it is scraped,” she said. “I can see that.”
“I meant the hearing.”
“I can test both.”
She removed the dressing. The opening she had made was healing; the scrape crossed the edge of it without tearing the closure. She cleaned the area, checked for swelling, and put on a fresh strip of cloth.
“Can I leave it off tomorrow?”
“If it stays clean.”
“I’m a mechanic.”
“Then probably not.”
She tested his hearing with the metal fork. The note sounded clear on both sides. Iven listened until it faded, then lowered his hand. Sera made a small mark in her notebook and closed it.
“Still good,” she said.
He had known that before the test. He had heard Tavin’s complaints all the way up the stairs. But knowing and seeing Sera’s mark on the page were different pleasures.
Kesh sat at the table with her injured leg on a crate. She had unpacked her leather case and laid out a series of small objects: the curved plate she had shown them before the expedition, a dark chip wrapped in cloth, and a narrow strip of metal with deep scratches along one edge.
“You carry a museum,” Iven said.
“Only the parts I can lift.”
Sera joined them. “What are you comparing?”
“The marks from three places. This strip came from a drill housing in the forward saddle. The chip came from a creature killed near a ruptured water line. The plate came from a creature that lost it while attacking a drill.”
She put the strip and the plate side by side. The scratches on the metal were irregular, with paired grooves at different angles. The plate’s edge showed a matching sort of wear but not a perfect fit.
“You think the same creature made both?” Iven asked.
“I think similar creatures can damage metal in similar ways. That’s not the same claim.”
Pellan arrived with Elian before Sera could respond. He carried a receipt for the returned drill frame and a folded note from the maintenance board. Elian held the map, now marked with the usable ramp and the narrow opening.
“The board accepted the tools,” Pellan said. “They want the broken drill bit separately.”
“Why?” Sera asked.
“They say it belongs to the contractor.”
Iven took the wrapped bit from the table. “The dust on it belongs to the passage.”
Pellan looked at him. “That’s what I said.”
“What did they say?”
“That I could submit a sample request.”
Sera opened the cloth and tipped a few grains into a clean packet. “Now the contractor can have the bit.”
Pellan smiled. “I told them you would do something like that.”
Elian spread the map on the table, careful not to disturb Kesh’s collection. “I spoke to the survey office. They have no record of the replacement brace at the site.”
“Pellan saw the crew put it in,” Iven said.
“I believe him. The record is missing from the office, not from the world.” Elian pointed to a symbol near the second housing. “This mark usually means a routine inspection. The report I found uses the same mark for the drill site.”
“Could it be shorthand?”
“It could. I need to see the original work request.”
“Can you?” Sera asked.
“My office has access. Whether the maintenance board will let me take a copy is another question.”
Kesh tapped the metal strip. “Before we decide what anyone hid, I want to know what the creatures were doing.”
Pellan folded his arms. “They attacked us.”
“They did. I’m not disputing that.”
“They would have killed Kesh if Iven hadn’t pulled her clear,” Sera said.
Kesh nodded. “And one of them attacked the brace while the other two came at us. That could mean the brace mattered. It could also mean the creature was responding to movement, sound, light, or damage. We need observations that separate those possibilities.”
Iven pulled out a chair. “How?”
“First, we ask people who have seen them. Not what they think the creatures are. What they saw before the attack.”
Pellan considered. “The drilling crew won’t like being questioned.”
“Then we ask Maret and Oris first,” Sera said. “Neither was drilling.”
Maret was resting at home. Lill let them in after Sera promised the visit would not take long. The room was small but bright, with a row of pots on the sill and a quilt folded at the foot of the bed. Maret’s injured leg rested on a cushion. She looked annoyed by the arrangement, which Sera took as a sign of improvement.
“We’re not here to make you walk,” Sera said.
“That is a relief. Lill has hidden my boots.”
“They’re under the bed,” Lill said.
Maret stared at her. “Why would you tell me?”
“Because you can’t get down to reach them without help.”
Kesh explained what she wanted to know. She asked Maret where the drill had been, whether it was moving, and whether she had seen the creature before the panel shifted.
“I heard it first,” she said. “A scraping under the platform. I thought it was a tool being dragged.”
“Did the drill continue?”
“No. The crew had stopped it before I came in. The noise from the housing was still going.”
“Was the bent pipe already damaged?”
“I don’t know. I saw it after I fell.”
“Did the creature come toward you?”
“It came up under the panel. I was on the panel. You can decide which of us it wanted.”
Kesh wrote that down without arguing. Iven appreciated the discipline. It would have been easy to turn Maret’s answer into proof of whichever idea he preferred.
Oris was back at the workshop, repairing a mask strap. He confirmed that the drilling had stopped before Maret fell. He had seen the creature for only a moment, through dust and lamplight.
“It turned toward the pipe,” he said. “Then the panel went. After that I was trying not to fall myself.”
“Did it touch the pipe?” Kesh asked.
“I saw it strike something. I can’t tell you what.”
Kesh thanked him. Oris looked surprised.
“You came all this way for that?”
“I came all this way because you were there.”
On the return walk, Iven asked what Kesh had learned.
“That I shouldn’t call Maret’s account the same as yours. She heard the scraping before the floor moved. You saw the creature strike the damaged pipe later. Oris saw part of it but couldn’t identify the object it hit.”
“That’s not much.”
“It’s more than I had yesterday.”
They stopped at a food cart while Sera went to buy fresh dressing. Kesh chose a filled pastry and broke it open carefully, letting steam escape before she bit into it. Iven followed her example and still burned his tongue.
“You’ve done this before,” he said.
“I study dangerous things.”
“I meant the pastry.”
“That’s where I began.”
They ate beneath a canopy while people passed along the walkway. A group of children ran after a rolling hoop, shouting at one another to give it room. The hoop struck a crack, jumped, and fell over. The smallest child picked it up and started again.
Kesh watched them. “When I was young, my father worked inside the forward saddle. He told me the creatures came for blood.”
“Was he wrong?”
“He had seen one attack an injured worker. He had also seen one tear into a damaged pipe. He remembered the worker more clearly.”
“That’s understandable.”
“Yes. It’s also not the whole pattern.”
Sera returned with the dressing and a small paper packet. She handed the packet to Iven. Inside was a salve for the scrape on his arm.
“Keep it clean,” she said.
“I’m beginning to think you enjoy giving me impossible tasks.”
“Then you’ll be pleased by the next one. The board wants a report tomorrow.”
“From all of us?”
“From someone who was there. Elian will submit his map, Pellan will report the tools, and Kesh will describe the creatures. I want you to describe the vent and the repaired door.”
“I can do that.”
“Good. Describe what you did, not what you hope they will believe.”
He put the packet in his coat. “You and Kesh should start a school.”
“We did,” Kesh said. “You enrolled by walking into a wall full of creatures.”
Before they separated, Sera asked to see Kesh’s notes. Kesh handed them over without explaining her cramped handwriting, which took Sera longer to interpret than the observations themselves.
“You’ve recorded the locations of every attack,” she said. “Have you recorded the places where no attack happened?”
Kesh frowned. “Not consistently.”
“If a hundred pipes are damaged and one draws a creature, that tells us something different from ten damaged pipes and nine attacks.”
“It does. I don’t have the numbers.”
“Then don’t make them up.”
She smiled without much pleasure. “You’d be surprised how often people prefer a confident answer.”
“No,” Sera said. “I wouldn’t.”
Iven remembered the pale scrape across the bright brace. “Could we ask the crews who work near damaged lines whether they’ve seen any?”
“We can,” Kesh said. “We should also ask where the creatures appear when no one has reported damage. Otherwise we’ll go looking only where we expect them.”
Sera returned the notes. “I’ll ask at the clinic. People come in with injuries from places that never reach the board’s reports.”
“Ask them whether they want their names recorded,” Kesh said. “Some workers won’t speak if they think their supervisor will see the account.”
“I already do.”
Kesh inclined her head. “Then I can learn something from your school.”
That evening Iven cleaned the scrape and mended his coat. The tear near the hem took several clumsy stitches. He was better with wire than thread, but the cloth held when he pulled it. The brass hook inside his right cuff remained in place, and his tools were all accounted for except a short length of rope left in the passage as a marker.
He sat at his table and wrote the report. The vent cover had fallen; they had wired it temporarily. The narrow door’s hinge had lost its pin; he had replaced it with a bolt from the drill frame. The bolt had bent under impact and needed proper replacement. He described the passage as they had found it, including the bad air and the flooded drain.
He paused over the sentence about the creatures. Kesh would write the observations. Iven wrote only that three had approached the group, one had struck the new brace, and all five people had returned.
It looked small on the page. Below it lay the weight of the creature against his brace, the scrape of armor in the opening, and the moment he had chosen to stand at the door rather than crawl through first. He did not need the report to carry all of that. He needed it to tell the next crew where the danger had been.
He added the direction from which the air had come and the position of the nearest sound support. If the board ignored the report, those details might still help the next worker who found a copy. He pictured a stranger reaching the bent hinge pin with a lamp in one hand and wished that stranger a better wrench than the one he had carried. Then he drew a small diagram of the pin and the temporary bolt, because a tired person in poor light might understand the picture faster than his handwriting.
He folded the page and placed it beside his tools. Tomorrow, someone at the board would read it. Whether they acted on it was another matter.