The younger operator’s hands had stopped shaking by the time the company supervisor asked him to sign the restart sheet.
They began again when he saw the line at the bottom.
Iven sat on an overturned crate outside the exchanger room, eating a heel of bread Mara had found in a cupboard. The repaired pump hummed behind the wall. Steam from the district kitchens drifted over a row of low roofs beyond the factory yard, carrying the smell of onion and coal. Caldrin’s heat system had delivered the upper district enough warmth to make people open windows; the lower shift had spent the same morning trapped beneath a machine that could have cooked them.
“Read it,” Mara told the operator.
He had already read it twice. He was nineteen, called Keslin, and still wore trousers wet to the knees from the flooded service channel. The older operator, Doro, stood beside him with a blanket around his shoulders. Both had declined the physician’s offer of a bed, though Doro had accepted tea and a warning about the cough he had developed under the hatch.
The supervisor held the sheet with a pen across it. “The company needs a record that the personnel affected by the interruption have returned to duty.”
