Kesh had drawn the first creature badly on purpose.
“It keeps people from pretending they recognize it,” she said, laying the sketch beside Elian’s map. “If I make it look precise, someone will see a pale animal with the wrong number of legs and decide it can’t be the same kind.”
The drawing resembled a sack with too many hinges. Iven could see her point.
They sat at a worktable in Sera’s borrowed clinic above the disused bathhouse. The room smelled of boiled water, oil, and the bitter herbs Sera kept for wounds. A window stood open to the late morning. Below it, children had turned the old bath steps into a game that involved shouting a great deal and apparently no bathing.
Elian had brought the amended housing map. The rope-shop rooms were marked in a different ink, each one numbered. A separate sheet recorded Arlen’s death and the emergency shore. The papers did not make Iven feel better about the stairwell, but he was relieved that someone looking at the next maintenance schedule would see the rooms.
Kesh placed a second drawing beside the first. “This one was seen near a cooling line on the forward saddle. Two workers reported it before the lower drill was running.”
“Doing what?” Sera asked.
“Crossing a passage. One worker said it was carrying something. The other said it wasn’t.”
“Did either see where it went?”
“Into a maintenance slot behind a water tank.”
Iven studied the map Elian had brought for the heat lines. The forward saddle lay a considerable distance from Brell’s chamber. A creature seen there could not reasonably be assumed to have come from the same opening, or even from the same set of passages.
“Was there drilling?” he asked.
“Not when they saw it. The tank crew had replaced a valve two days earlier.”
Sera tapped the map. “Any injury to the surrounding tissue?”
“The report calls it a cracked liner.”
“Which could mean anything,” Iven said.
“Exactly.” Kesh set a folded note beside the sketch. “I want to visit the site before we decide the creatures only appear when drills are running.”
Sera had a patient arriving at noon. She could not leave the clinic for half a day, but she gave Kesh a clean sample tube and instructions for preserving anything that might be tissue. Elian offered to accompany them with the maintenance map. Iven checked that Neri had enough hands for the replacement plate in Brell’s chamber, then agreed to go.
The trip to the forward saddle required two lift changes and a walk along a covered service bridge. Mercy’s movement was more noticeable on the bridge than in Rung Ward. The deck rose in a slow incline, held, then eased downward. Flexible joints in the rails allowed the sections to shift without tearing apart. A passenger who had never traveled between saddles gripped the rail and asked whether the bridge was supposed to do that.
“Usually,” Iven said.
The passenger tightened her grip.
“That’s not as reassuring as you think,” Kesh told him.
“I wasn’t trying to reassure her. I was trying to be accurate.”
At the forward saddle, the air was cooler and smelled of damp rope. The water tank stood inside a service enclosure beneath a line of workshops. A man with a scarred chin met them at the door. He introduced himself as Tern, the tank foreman, and listened to Kesh’s explanation with an expression that suggested he had expected a request for money.
“We replaced the valve,” he said. “The old one wouldn’t seat. A liner cracked when we drained the tank, but we patched it.”
“Did you cut into the wall?” Kesh asked.
“No. The liner’s inside the tank.”
“Can we see?”
“You can see the outside. The tank’s full.”
He led them around the curved iron wall. A fresh patch showed near the base, its rivets bright against older metal. The maintenance slot behind it was a narrow opening between the tank and the outer wall. A person would have to turn sideways to enter.
“The creature came through there,” Tern said. “My men saw it cross the floor and go back the same way.”
Iven crouched beside the slot. Pale dust marked the edge, but he could not tell whether it had come from a creature or the wall itself. He shone his lamp into the gap. A length of pipe ran behind the tank, disappearing into a dark recess. The wall was dry.
“Any vibration?” he asked.
“Only when the pump starts.”
“Can you run it?”
Tern folded his arms. “Why?”
“Because I’d like to hear what the creature might have heard.”
“You can stand here through the next cycle. I’m not starting a pump for a visitor.”
That was reasonable. It also meant waiting half an hour.
While they waited, Elian compared the enclosure to the survey. The tank had been moved several feet during a repair five years earlier. The map still showed its old position. Kesh examined the floor and found a shallow curved scratch beneath the slot, partly covered by dust. Iven found another on the underside of a pipe support.
“Could be a tool,” Tern said.
“Could,” Kesh agreed. “That’s why I’m drawing it instead of calling it a footprint.”
The pump began with a low knock. Water moved through the pipe behind the tank. The support rattled twice, then settled. Iven put his hand against the wall. The vibration was faint and regular.
Nothing emerged.
A sharp hiss interrupted the pump’s first cycle. The patch near the tank base bowed outward, and a narrow jet struck the floor beside the lamp. Tern shoved his nearest worker back before the seam opened wider.
“Close the intake,” he shouted. “Not the drain. We have people below it.”
The worker ran for the wheel. Iven caught the loose end of a hose before it could whip into him, then pressed a timber block against the patch. The pressure drove through his palms. Kesh seized the block from the side, bracing it against a sound rib rather than the thin patched wall.
The pump slowed. Water spilled around the block but no longer struck the lamp. Tern brought a clamp, and Iven fitted it over the patch while Kesh held the timber. They tightened it in alternating turns. When the intake finally stopped, the jet dwindled to a drip.
“The drain goes to the wash rooms,” Tern said, watching the worker return. “If he’d opened it at full pressure, we’d have flooded the families below.”
Iven marked the temporary clamp with chalk. It would hold for the inspection, not the next full shift. Tern sent a runner for a replacement patch and ordered the pump kept isolated. Two workshops would lose their water until the repair was finished; he went himself to explain the interruption instead of calling the closure an inconvenience on a form.
They watched the passage until the pump stopped. Tern spread his hands. “There. You’ve heard it.”
“We have,” Kesh said. “Thank you.”
She did not look disappointed. She looked thoughtful, which was more useful and often less comfortable.
Outside the enclosure, a worker carrying a bucket stopped when he saw Kesh’s sketches. “You’re asking about the pale thing?”
“We are,” she said.
“It went under the old wash platform. My brother found a mark there yesterday.”
Tern frowned. “Why didn’t he tell me?”
“He told the shift clerk.”
“The shift clerk didn’t tell me.”
“Then you can ask him.”
The worker led them across the service lane to a low platform beside a drain. Its boards had been lifted for cleaning and laid loosely back across the frame. Beneath them, a strip of pale material had been scored with three parallel grooves. The grooves ended at a patch where the surface looked darker and softer.
Kesh crouched. “May I lift a board?”
The worker nodded. Tern did not object.
The board came free with a damp sucking sound. Under it lay a section of curved wall, partly hidden by a broken liner. Dark fluid had dried around a small split. A thin strand of pale material crossed the split like a poorly tied stitch.
Sera would want to see it. Iven had no intention of disturbing it before she did.
Kesh drew the mark and the split. Elian measured their position against the tank and the nearest pipe. The worker watched with growing interest.
“Does that mean the thing was fixing it?” he asked.
“It means it was here,” Kesh said. “The rest is a question.”
Tern examined the broken liner. “We didn’t know that was underneath.”
“Who installed the liner?” Iven asked.
“Before my time.”
“Who maintains it?”
“The wash crew, I suppose.” Tern looked at the worker. “Do they?”
“They clean the platform. I don’t know whether anyone checks underneath.”
The tank foreman rubbed his scarred chin. “I’ll have the shift clerk find the record.”
The worker looked pleased to have found a way to pass trouble upward.
Iven replaced the board, leaving it loose enough for Sera to inspect. He marked the corner with chalk and wrote a warning against stepping there. Tern supplied a short barrier from the tank enclosure. Together they put it around the platform so the wash crew would see it.
Kesh stood with her notebook open. “At Brell’s chamber the creature appeared when the drill ran. Here one was seen when there was no drill and no pump running.”
“Both places have a damaged surface,” Elian said.
“Possibly,” Kesh replied. “The mark at Brell’s could have been made by the drill. This one might be older.”
“And the animal might have been passing through both places for reasons we haven’t seen,” Iven said.
Tern looked between them. “You came all this way to tell me you don’t know?”
“We came to see what was here,” Kesh said. “We found a damaged surface and a reason not to claim the drill is the only explanation.”
Tern considered that. “Will you tell me if you learn something useful?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll let the wash crew know not to step through the barrier.”
They left him instructing the worker to find the shift clerk. The worker seemed less pleased now.
On the way back across the bridge, Elian asked Iven whether the line near Brell’s mounting could be braced without touching the wall at all.
“Neri’s plate does most of that,” Iven said. “It takes the pipe’s movement into the metal frame. But the tissue behind the old mounting is still exposed.”
“Could the pipe be moved?”
“Eventually. It would need a new run, supports, and a shutdown long enough to connect them. We can design it. We can’t do it between breakfast and the evening heat cycle.”
Elian made a note. “I can ask what material is available.”
“You can ask who owns it too. The answers may not match.”
“I’ve noticed.”
At Sera’s clinic, a child sat on the waiting bench with a bandaged ankle. Her mother held her hand while Sera checked the wrap. The doctor did not interrupt the examination when the three of them arrived. Iven waited by the door and watched the child attempt to convince Sera that a bandage meant she could climb the bath steps again immediately.
“A bandage means you can stop bleeding on my floor,” Sera said. “It doesn’t make the ankle stronger.”
The child considered this an inadequate design.
When they had gone, Kesh showed Sera the sketch of the split beneath the wash platform. Sera read the notes, then asked three questions about the strand, the fluid, and the distance from the tank. Kesh answered what she had seen and refused to guess at the rest.
“I want to visit,” Sera said.
“Tern will let you,” Iven replied. “He wants to know if the thing will come back.”
“I can’t promise that.”
“He’ll be disappointed, but he survived us.”
Sera placed the sketch beside the notes from Brell’s chamber. “The similarities are worth testing. A damaged surface in two places, reported pale creatures near both. But the timing isn’t the same, and we don’t know whether these are the same kind of creature.”
Kesh drew a circle around the second mark. “We need a test that changes one thing while we can see what happens.”
“Without cutting another wound,” Iven said.
“Yes.”
They spent the next hour arguing over what they could safely change. A drill on scrap produced noise and vibration but did not reproduce the damage beneath the mounting. A covered mounting changed access to the wound but also changed the pipe’s movement. Moving the pipe entirely would take too long and create new risks.
Neri arrived carrying a folded drawing. She listened, asked to see the old plate, and laid her design over the map.
“What if you put the bridging plate on first,” she said, “but leave the damaged edge accessible through a small opening? You can run the pipe at the reduced setting and observe. Then you close the opening with a removable cover and observe again.”
Sera frowned. “The cover could press on the tissue.”
“Not if it stands off the wall.” Neri marked a narrow gap. “It attaches to the frame, not the surface.”
Kesh examined the sketch. “The creatures could still enter the chamber.”
“They could. That’s why Brell has a whistle and Iven has a bad habit of standing where the danger is.”
“I’m right here,” Iven said.
“I know. You’re demonstrating it.”
The design did not solve every uncertainty. It gave them a safer way to compare two conditions without deliberately making a new wound. Brell would still have to agree, the valve engineer would still have to hold the flow, and the crew would need a barrier that could be installed without trapping anyone at the mounting.
Sera looked at the drawing, then at Kesh. “We record what happens in both conditions. If the creatures arrive, we stop. No one tries to touch them.”
“And if they don’t?” Kesh asked.
“We record that too.”
Iven thought of the creature beneath the pipe, striking metal and turning toward the damaged wall. He wanted an answer that would tell Brell’s crew exactly how to work safely. He wanted one that would tell Sera what the dark fluid meant. He wanted one that would make the creatures less likely to bite someone.
A drawing could not promise any of those things. It could give them a way to learn without adding another broken piece to the wall.
Neri rolled up the design. “I’ll make the cover. You convince Brell to let us try it.”
“She already likes me,” Iven said.
“Then don’t spoil it by talking.”
Below the open window, the children on the bath steps had invented a new rule. One of them declared that the top step was now a ship and everyone else had to pay to board. The argument that followed was loud and immediate.
Sera listened for a moment. “At least someone in this district understands public consultation.”
Iven took the drawing from Neri and headed for the door before she could revise her opinion of his silence. The second mark had not answered the question. It had made the question better.