Ossa Min could attend a course for two hours after the cart yard closed. She could not leave her workshop for six weeks.
Sera heard the difference on day 1265, when the North Tally clinic asked whether the repair notes could be taught locally. Its washing-water loop was safe at its current small duty, but the town wanted more capacity and a clearer place for people arriving injured from the freight tracks. The clinic had an ordinary fitter, a busy nurse and a yard full of patients who could not wait for every worker to become a full-time student at a western station.
“Do not promise them a pressure plant made from a copied page,” said Umet, the responsible fitter at the town’s guarded test bed. “I can teach a cold fit and the inspection. A loaded machine needs its own operator.”
“Then put that distinction in the first lesson,” Sera said.
They spread the proposed booklet across the clinic’s long table. Sera wrote the receiving-room and patient-flow sections from her own work: keep a clear route for a carried person, separate clean supplies from soiled ones, give the injured worker somewhere to sit before somebody asked for a witness statement. The local nurse corrected a passage that assumed two staff would be present after midnight. North Tally often had one.
