Iven woke to someone trying to steal his boots.
He caught the wrist before the second heel came free.
“They’re wet,” Sera Holt said.
He lay on a narrow cot in a room he did not recognize. Daylight shone through green bottles on the windowsill. His left forearm rested in a wooden support. His first thought was that he had lost the graft. His second was that he had apparently become the sort of man who cared about stolen property before knowing where he was.
“Keep the boots,” Sera said. “We can treat the feet afterward.”
He let go.
She pulled the boot off, set it beside a heater, and examined a dressing on his palm. Through an open doorway he could hear someone arguing about soup.
He could hear it.
The words were still blurred, particularly the higher sounds, but they existed. A spoon struck a bowl in the next room. He listened to it with an interest the spoon did not deserve.
“Better?” Sera asked.
He nodded.
“Tell me if that changes.” She checked his pupils. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“A captain making me sit down.”
“That happened several times. Choose one.”
He tried to remember. The roof, her face, the warm band around his arm. Sann at the station pointing him toward a chair. Someone had put a cup into his hands and taken it away before he could spill it.
“Did they clear the chapel?”
“Yes.”
“The north roofs?”
“Their crews finished at dusk. Mother Vale has been checking names all morning.”
“The knife man—”
“Is sharpening the kitchen’s knives in exchange for breakfast. I’m beginning to regret the arrangement. They’re now sharp enough to require adult supervision.”
He let his head settle against the folded blanket.
The relief made him feel briefly ill.
Sera drew the stool closer. Her dark coat hung on a peg, revealing a plain shirt with a pale, branching line visible at the collar. He had seen grafts in living people before, usually from several feet away while a licensed restorer explained that the expensive part was expertise.
“Yours is different,” he said.
She glanced down. “Older. Better maintained.”
“I meant where it is.”
“Different placement suits different work. Yours suits hands-on mechanical practice, if you stop trying to feed vibration into your skull.”
“I wasn’t trying.”
“I assumed.”
She unwrapped his forearm. The graft’s pale branches lay beneath the skin, a little more distinct than they had been in the workshop. One short section near his wrist looked gray.
He noticed her noticing it.
“Is it dying?”
“No. Part of its return root was cut before implantation. I need to map the remaining connections before I give you a more useful answer.”
“Can you fix it?”
“Probably. Not by saying reassuring things at it.”
She produced a little instrument with two fine metal contacts. He flinched when she set it beside his wrist. The sensation was cool rather than painful. A needle moved behind a cloudy glass face.
“Did the instructions mention resting after transfer?” she asked.
“Several times.”
“How did you interpret that?”
“I thought about it while climbing.”
For the first time her mouth moved toward a smile. She suppressed it with professional determination.
“You have an ordinary cultivated graft. It isn’t limitless. It isn’t teaching you everything you need to know, and pain does not mean you’re doing the work correctly.”
“I know about pain.”
“Then learn something else.”
She asked him to find the bell’s pattern without using it. He closed his eyes. The memory of the repaired bronze lay beneath the surface of awareness: pressure, flex, release. He could follow it more easily now that he was not trying to keep a rescue cage from tearing out of a wall.
The gauge needle moved.
“There,” Sera said. “That’s enough. Let it settle.”
He released his attention. The warmth in his arm faded.
“What did I spend?” he asked.
She looked at him more carefully. “You understand there’s a reserve?”
“The restorer who used to service the upper cranes complained whenever someone asked him to pull twice. I thought he was just charging by the complaint.”
“Possibly both.” She showed him the gauge. “Charge. A useful measure, provided you remember that two careless actions can spend what five precise ones would. You were depleted, cold, and exhausted. Your graft didn’t demand a sacrifice.”
He had not put that fear into words. Hearing it dismissed mattered more than he wanted to show.
She wrapped his arm again, leaving his hand free.
“No resonance practice until I’ve had another look. Ordinary use of your hands is fine. Food is compulsory.”
“I’m poor. We don’t normally use that word about food.”
She stood. “Then this is an educational opportunity.”
In the next room, Mother Vale had taken command of a borrowed clinic kitchen. The room seemed too small to contain her, three volunteers, two patients, and a table covered in bowls, but she had managed through an arrangement of stern glances and astonishingly narrow routes between chairs.
She put a bowl in front of Iven before he sat down.
The soup contained beans, onions, and a piece of actual fat that was almost certainly intended for someone else. He began to say so.
“If you’re about to count my beans,” Vale said, “you can wash the bowls instead.”
He ate.
Asa came through the door carrying a canvas bag and a list. Her sleeves were rolled up. She had slept less than he had.
“Your tools,” she said, setting the bag beside him. “Except the awl. Brin has it.”
“Why?”
“He says he’s apprenticing.”
“That’s a rapid promotion.”
She pulled out a chair. For a little while she said nothing, just rubbed the base of her thumb and watched him eat. He remembered those hands passing bread across a stall counter beside Leda’s hands, quick and flour-white.
He fixed his attention on the bowl.
“We found everyone from the chapel,” she said. “Not everyone from the whole street yet. Some went to relatives and forgot there are people looking for them.”
“I can help check.”
“After Holt says you can.”
“She said ordinary hand use.”
“Your mouth is making extraordinary use of itself. Try the soup.”
He did.
Asa took a small brass object out of her bag. The inside hook from his coat cuff. It must have torn loose on the roof.
“Found it under the plank,” she said.
He took it. The little hook had been his father’s, though not in any grand inheritable sense. It had come attached to a coat and survived longer than the man who wore it.
“Thanks.”
“Iven.”
He looked up reluctantly.
“Yesterday was good work.”
He could have hidden behind a joke. She had given him room for one.
“Yours too,” he said.
She nodded, accepting that, and began sorting the list instead of waiting for an explanation of why he suddenly had trouble swallowing.
A knock at the outer door brought in a long-limbed man wearing a Survey Office coat. His cuffs were clean enough to look nervous in the clinic. He carried a rolled map, a flat case of instruments, and the expression of someone who had already apologized at several wrong addresses.
“Elian Veyr,” he said. “I was told the ward organizers were here.”
Vale pointed at a stool. “You were told correctly. Sit out of the doorway.”
He obeyed.
Iven watched him set the case down carefully. The governor’s name belonged in speeches and on emergency orders. Hearing it attached to a man making room for a bucket was disorienting.
Elian unrolled his map on the table after asking permission. He had marked the damaged branch in red. The map showed the bathhouse, Rung Gate, and the maintenance chapel. It did not show the houses behind Seam Three.
Asa tapped the empty space.
“You’ve missed a street.”
“Those are disused structures.”
“Then they’ll be surprised by their breakfast.”
He looked up. She did not smile.
“How many occupied?” he asked.
“Come look.”
“I need to finish the return assessment.”
“Then you need to know where the return goes.” Iven turned the map toward himself. “This branch serves those houses before it reaches the bathhouse. Your printed line ends a hundred yards early.”
Elian took a pencil from his case. He did not immediately alter the map. Iven disliked him for that, until he saw the man write a question in the margin and ask Asa for the names of two residents.
At least he was collecting something he could check.
“Will you take me?” Elian asked her.
“When I’m finished here.”
“I’ll wait.”
Mother Vale found him a bowl. His surprise suggested he had not expected the disaster’s unofficial headquarters to feed him.
Iven was finishing his soup when the clinic door opened again.
The woman from the roof walked in with a square of rotten timber under one arm.
She dropped it onto the clean corner of the table. Elian rescued his map just in time.
“Neri Quill,” she said to the room generally. “If anyone says this passed a load inspection, ask what load. A moth could have eaten its way through.”
Vale raised a finger.
Neri looked at the table, then at the bowl in Iven’s hand. “Fine. I’ll take it outside.”
She lifted the timber again and studied him.
“You can hear now?”
“Enough to be criticized.”
“Good. It saves writing.”
She nodded toward the outer landing. “When you’re dressed, come look at something. I’m paying for useful eyes.”
Sera appeared in the kitchen doorway.
“He is not lifting anything.”
“I didn’t offer to pay for his back.”
The two women regarded each other, reached an agreement without bothering to invite him into it, and turned toward their separate work.
Iven looked down at his hands. The left one was bandaged, but the fingers moved. The right held his father’s brass hook. Yesterday he had been a contract mechanic trying to collect a late payment. Today a structural engineer was offering him work because she had watched him do something difficult.
He wanted that work.
The wanting felt clean enough to enjoy.
He finished the soup, washed the bowl, and went to find his boots.
They were warm from the heater and stiff with dried grit. When he bent to lace them, Neri handed him a piece of clean cloth for the raw place above his heel. She had evidently assessed the boots while discussing rotten timber.
“How much am I being paid?” he asked.
“Depends what you see.”
“That seems vulnerable to invention.”
“Then I’ll subtract whatever you make me spend checking it.”
She led him onto the clinic’s outer landing. The morning wind caught his face. Their borrowed rooms stood on the edge of a higher deck, where wash lines stretched between houses and small planters occupied every sunny corner. Below, Rung Ward’s wet roofs lay beneath strips of drying cloth. Yesterday’s flood had left a pale stain halfway up the bathhouse door.
Beyond the ward the city ended at an armored ridge, and beyond that was air. Far below, the Reach spread in dark mats and silver channels. A flock of birds circled something disturbed by Mercy’s passing. One of the creature’s distant limbs rose, planted itself, and transferred a tremor through the landing beneath his boots.
He had missed the smell of open air without knowing it.
“You’re not replacing a licensed restorer,” Neri said.
He glanced at her.
“You were about to ask. You’re looking at a freight landing. I need to know whether the failure began in its frame or in the way the carrier loads it. The carrier’s man says the frame. The frame’s man says the carrier.”
“And you?”
“I think neither of them wants to pay.”
He rested his hands on the rail. In the ward below, a line of people was passing salvaged bedding out of a house. The bedding would have to be washed, dried, returned to rooms that still smelled of floodwater. An emergency could be over and leave months of work behind it.
“Who pays you?” he asked.
“My cooperative, until we can make someone else.”
“That’s a poor business.”
“Sometimes. Dessa says I should specialize in respectable staircases for people who don’t need them.”
He looked at the piece of rotten packing under her arm.
“Would you?”
“For an outrageous price. Then I’d spend it down here.”
She headed toward the freight landing. Iven followed, moving slowly enough to avoid Sera’s wrath and quickly enough to suggest he was not obeying it.
For the first time since waking, he forgot to listen for what was missing from his hearing. He was thinking about a frame, a carrier, and which of their owners was lying.