The carrier’s man brought three witnesses and no tools.
Neri watched him climb onto the freight landing, then looked at Iven. “You’ll learn to recognize that.”
“An inspector?”
“An invoice preparing to escape.”
The man introduced himself as Garran, acting for Krail Haulage. His witnesses carried a measuring rod, a board of schedules, and an expression of preemptive resentment respectively. Garran himself carried a clean handkerchief. He used it on the rail before touching anything.
Iven stood aside. He had slept a second night without fever and could hear words again, though the edges of sound still felt rubbed away. Sera had permitted the inspection on the condition that he keep his graft quiet. A working pair of eyes did not need charge.
The landing hung above a service court between two inhabited blocks. Beneath it, children carried empty water tins while volunteers stripped damaged insulation from the return pipes. The freight line fed the ward’s workshops. Yesterday’s inspection had stopped it, and every stopped hour meant someone below could not earn enough to replace their ruined bedding.
That made Garran’s clean handkerchief look especially provocative.
“Your structure is out of true,” he told Neri.
“How much?”
He held out a hand. The witness with the rod scrambled to supply it.
Neri waited while they measured the nearest rail.
“Three fingers at the receiving edge,” Garran said.
“Under what load?”
“It’s out of true now.”
“With a full cage on it?”
He looked toward the empty freight frame. “I understood you’d inspected the damage.”
“I’m inspecting your explanation.”
Iven crouched near the receiving shoe. Scoring marked the inner face of the guide. He ran a fingertip along it, finding a ridge of recent metal above months of polished wear. The shoe had been striking from the side before the outer bracket moved.
He could picture the motion. He wanted to touch the graft to it and see whether that gave him something else.
He kept his left hand on his knee.
“How often do you load from the south?” he asked.
Garran turned. “Who are you?”
“The man who asked about the south.”
Neri made a small sound that might have been a cough.
“Iven Marr,” she said. “He’s looking at the carrier.”
“Is he licensed?”
“For seeing?”
“For this machinery.”
“He’s working under my contract. Answer him.”
The witness with the schedules said, “Every third morning, when we take the kitchen barrels.”
“And what comes back?”
“Empty barrels.”
Iven looked down at the court. Behind a shuttered store, six empty barrels stood stacked against the wall. Their iron hoops were thick, their bottoms reinforced. Empty did not mean weightless.
“Do they return together?”
“Usually.”
He asked to see the schedule board. Garran said it was not relevant. Neri held out her hand until the witness surrendered it.
The outbound loads were listed by weight. The returns were listed by number.
There it was.
“You’re bringing the barrel frames back too,” Iven said.
The witness nodded before Garran could stop him.
“Stacked on the south edge. That puts the center outside the receiving shoe. The cage comes in crooked before your men pull it straight.”
“It’s within capacity,” Garran said.
“It could be full of feathers and still arrive at the wrong angle.”
Neri knelt beside the guide. Iven showed her the scoring, then pointed beneath the landing to the offset clamp.
“The frame’s moving as well,” she said.
He looked again. A rear joint had opened. Not enough to see from the deck, but enough to add a little movement every time a lopsided cage struck the shoe.
“I can shim that,” he said.
“Until the next step twists it out.”
“If we spread it—”
She pointed to the load below his suggested shim. A transverse brace ended against a decorative facing board. The real support stood a foot farther inward.
He stopped.
He had followed the iron and not the timber behind it.
“Then we have two faults,” he said.
“Yes.”
Garran brightened. “Structural failure.”
“And carrier misuse,” Neri said. “You can enjoy your half.”
The argument that followed had the tedious precision of men trying to make a number smaller without changing it. Neri let it continue while her rigger Dessa Morn set a temporary line. Jem Tarl, the cooperative’s carpenter, brought a length of sound timber from a handcart and began marking the brace positions.
Iven joined them.
“Are we being paid?” he asked Dessa.
“She’ll make someone.”
“That’s what she told me.”
“She’s consistent.”
They lifted the frame’s unloaded corner just enough to seat the new timber against the actual support. Iven fitted the shims. Jem cut a locking wedge. Neri checked the whole path twice before she allowed anyone to put a test load on it.
They used bags of sand, not people.
Garran objected to the time. A woman in the court below shouted up that her son carried those kitchen barrels. He stopped objecting where she could hear him.
The first test brought the cage in level. The guide shoe met its stop without a sideways strike. The new brace took weight with a little settling creak and stayed where it belonged.
Iven could feel his own grin arriving before he had time to conceal it.
Neri saw. “It’s a good sound, isn’t it?”
He listened. A working landing. No ugly scrape, no second knock hidden beneath the first.
“Could be better,” he said.
“Naturally.”
She handed him the rod. “Measure it under load. Then you can criticize.”
By midday the carrier had agreed to change its loading arrangement, the cooperative had accepted responsibility for the misplaced brace, and Garran had signed a split-cost repair order with an expression suitable for a bereavement.
Neri paid Iven out of her own purse.
He counted the coins once. It was more than he had expected.
“You found the return load,” she said.
“I missed the support.”
“I noticed. If I’d paid you to know everything, I’d be bankrupt.”
She left to argue about another landing, carrying the bad brace as evidence. Iven watched her go for a moment before taking the hint from Dessa’s expression and returning the measuring rod.
On the way back to the clinic, he found Asa and Elian outside the unmarked houses behind Seam Three.
Elian had taken off his official coat. A little girl was sitting on it while her grandmother showed him a rent receipt. Asa stood in the shade, arms crossed, supervising his education.
“Disused?” Iven asked.
Elian looked up. “No.”
The answer was plain enough to disarm the rest of Iven’s intended remarks.
“The survey revision removed this block two winters ago,” Elian continued. “I need to find out why.”
“Ask whoever signed it,” Asa said.
His face altered. Only a small tightening around the mouth, but Iven saw it.
“I intend to,” Elian said.
He had not corrected the whole city by walking down one street. Still, he was on the street. Iven decided to allow that its modest value.
Asa followed him when he left. At the corner she took a wrapped heel of bread from her bag and handed it over.
“For not making him run away before he looks.”
“I can be diplomatic.”
“You look ill when you do it.”
She returned to the houses. Iven ate the bread while walking, enjoying the sensation of having earned money and been fed on the same day.
Sera was waiting at the clinic with his empty graft vessel.
He stopped in the doorway.
“The College sent it,” she said. “Along with a complaint.”
“Was the complaint valuable?”
“More carefully prepared than the vessel’s inspection.”
She motioned him inside. On the table lay a drawing of his graft’s root connections. Two return branches ended abruptly where they should have joined a common trunk. The instrument beside it had produced a row of tiny marks.
“When you send an oscillation through the working channel,” she said, “some comes back through the wrong route. That is what affected your hearing.”
“Then close that route.”
“And send the excess where?”
He studied the drawing. The obvious answer would leave the force with nowhere safe to go. In a pipe it would produce a pressure spike. In a graft connected to his arm, he preferred not to finish the comparison.
“A bypass,” he said.
“Possibly. I’d like to know more about the damaged return first.”
“Can you get the cultivation drawings?”
“Not by asking politely.”
He looked at her collarbone graft, then at the borrowed room. A woman who could do this work ought to have been employed somewhere with better cupboards.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m no longer a member of the College.”
“Retired?”
“Expelled.”
He sat down.
“That’s generally the more interesting answer.”
“It is not an assurance that I was right.”
“Neither’s membership.”
She considered him, then gave him the pencil.
“Draw the bell repair. Everything you changed, in order. Don’t leave out the part you think was foolish.”
He began with the bent clapper pin. She interrupted only to ask which pieces had moved under load and where he had put his left hand. When he drew the signaling socket, she asked him to repeat the direction of the pulse without activating it.
He found the pattern and held it.
For the first time he noticed a tiny second movement at its edge, an oscillation returning toward the gray branch beneath his wrist. The discovery thrilled and unsettled him together.
It was a fault. A specific one.
He could learn a specific fault.
Sera marked the corresponding point on the drawing.
“Good. Now let it go.”
He did.
“Can I use other functions without that happening?”
“We test that. We don’t guess.”
Someone called from the adjoining room. Sera put down the pencil, and Iven moved his chair so a kitchen volunteer could carry a patient through the door. The man held a towel against a cut on his arm. Blood had soaked through to his fingers.
“Rim of a wash tin,” the volunteer explained. “He was trying to carry too many.”
Sera washed her hands and examined the injury. The patient watched her collarbone rather than her face.
“Can you just close it?” he asked.
“I can help it stay closed. You will still have to stop opening it.”
Her manner changed without becoming softer. She described what she was going to do, waited for his agreement, and asked Iven to move the lamp. When she lifted a small clamp, the graft at her collar glimmered faintly beneath the skin.
The clamp held without pressure from her fingers.
Not far, not dramatically. A careful, steady force at exactly the place she needed it. It freed both hands for the rest of the work.
Iven watched the patient’s shoulders ease. The man had come in expecting either a miracle or a bill he could not pay. Now he was being given instructions he could follow.
Afterward Sera wrote them down and made him repeat the important part about keeping the arm clean. She accepted a promise of help moving cupboards instead of money.
“That’s borrowing?” Iven asked when they were alone.
“A function learned from a repaired surgical clamp. Quite small. Quite useful.”
“How long can you hold it?”
“Long enough for that job. If I need an hour, I use an ordinary sound clamp and save my reserve.”
He liked that answer. The graft had not made tools foolish. It had given her another hand where a third hand was needed.
Sera looked at his drawing again. “You understood a load without it today. Keep doing that. When you do choose to spend charge, you’ll know what work you actually want.”
Iven took the pencil back and corrected one of his arrows.
She took another sheet from her stack. “I need a hand winch on the west maintenance route restored. Its owner has been trying to lift a feed hatch with a crowbar. If you want to learn, come with me tomorrow.”
“Do I get paid?”
“For the repair, yes. For being taught, you get to pay attention.”
He looked at his drawing: crooked lines, arrows, an attempt to describe what his hands knew. Brin had been right about arrows having opinions. His were arguing with each other.
“I can do both.”
Sera took the paper, turned it, and wrote a meeting place across the top.
The west maintenance route lay inside Mercy’s rear armor, below the deepest streets he had ever serviced. Iven had heard about its greenways since childhood. He had never had a reason or the authority to enter one.
Tomorrow he would have work there.
On the way out he found a scrap of clean cloth, sat on the step, and sewed the brass hook back inside his right cuff. It was an ordinary little repair. No strange pattern rose in his graft. He had kept his left arm relaxed and his attention on the needle, choosing the thing he actually needed done.
He tested the hook with his thumb.
Then he put the meeting place in his pocket and went home.