At the west maintenance entrance, Sera made Iven turn his pockets out.
“I’m not carrying anything valuable,” he said.
“That is what I’m checking.”
She removed three loose washers, a nail, and a twist of oily cloth from the pile. The tools could stay. The rest she put in a box beside the gate.
“No loose scrap beyond the greenway.”
“Someone growing it?”
“Something can swallow it. Follow the marked path until you know which surfaces are safe.”
The gatekeeper recognized her and pretended not to for several awkward seconds. Then she produced a maintenance call signed by the owner of the broken winch. He read the signature, looked at Iven’s bandaged arm, and decided that whatever trouble this might cause could be assigned to somebody else.
He opened the gate.
The stair beyond curved through a wall of living armor.
Iven had stood inside the back of Mercy before. Every basement in Rung Ward sat against some part of the creature, and the warm service walls were an ordinary feature of his work. This was different. Here the buildings thinned away. The path descended beside growths that rose thicker than street trees, their surfaces ridged and translucent in the lamp glow.
Condensation gathered on suspended roots and dropped into a shallow channel. A bed of tiny green leaves turned as the draft changed. Somewhere farther down, water moved with a slow, heavy pulse.
He stopped on the third landing.
Sera waited.
“I thought it would smell worse,” he said.
“There are places that will satisfy you.”
The air smelled of wet clay and cut stems. The warmth settled into his coat, less harsh than the ward’s leaking heat lines. He could hear the faint rustling of small things moving through the leaves.
He had spent years tracing the returns up through diagrams. None of the diagrams had bothered to include this.
They crossed a boardwalk bolted to a stone-colored ridge and came to a feed hatch overlooking a dark chamber. A man sat beside it eating from a tin. He had put his crowbar across the winch handle as though hoping the machine would become ashamed of itself.
“Derrit,” Sera said.
“Doctor. You brought a smaller doctor.”
“Mechanic,” Iven said.
“Better. Mine quit.”
He pointed with his spoon. The hand winch stood on a plated base beside the hatch. Its cable vanished through a guide toward a lifting frame below. The housing had been opened and put back together in the wrong order. A bearing cap sat against its seat at an angle.
Iven looked at the crowbar.
“Don’t,” Derrit said. “I’ve heard enough about it.”
“Did the last person say to stop using it?”
“Several times.”
“Then I’ll save us both the speech.”
He put his tool bag down and inspected the lifting path before touching the mechanism. The lower frame was empty. Its counterweight rested against a stop. He could work without a loaded cable hanging over his hands.
Sera stood where she could watch the graft as well as the machine.
“You don’t have to explain a gear to me,” he told her.
“Excellent. Then this should be quick.”
It was not.
The bent cap had forced the shaft sideways. One tooth had broken off the drive wheel and lodged behind the lower bearing. Pulling harder on the handle had pressed it deeper, scoring the housing. Iven held the broken tooth up for Derrit to see.
The man considered it. “Probably the apprentice.”
“Does the apprentice have a crowbar?”
“You ask a lot of questions.”
Iven smiled and began cleaning the bearing seat.
Derrit fetched a box of old parts. Most were useless for this job. Two bushings were the wrong diameter; a replacement wheel had an extra tooth. Iven rejected them and found a short length of suitable stock wrapped in cloth at the bottom.
“Keeping that for something?” he asked.
“I was going to have a latch made.”
“Would you rather have the latch or the hatch?”
Derrit gave him the stock.
Iven worked while Sera asked questions that were less foolish than he had expected. Which surface actually carried the load? What returned the handle to rest? How did the mechanism stop the weight dragging it backward? She was making him separate several familiar actions instead of calling all of them winching.
“If you borrow the pull,” she said, “where does the reaction go?”
“The base. Or me, if I’m not fixed to something.”
“Remember that.”
He fitted the replacement bushing, dressed the damaged seat, and rebuilt the housing. The drive tooth would need replacing properly at a workshop. For now he could move the sound wheel from an unused secondary mechanism Derrit had stored beside the hatch. Its bearing was worn, but the wheel itself was intact.
The exchange cost time and an increasing pile of grime-black cloths.
Iven enjoyed it.
This was work he could put in order. A cause, a consequence, a part that fitted or did not. The pleasure did not make the people he had failed disappear. It did allow him to be somewhere else for an hour.
Sera said nothing while he checked the clearances.
When he was ready, he turned the handle with no load on the line.
The movement was smooth. The catch held. He unwound, rewound, and tested the stop. Then Derrit lowered a weighted basket onto the lifting frame.
“No people,” Iven said before the man could suggest it.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Good.”
He wound the load up. The base accepted the pull. The guide stayed true. Under his left palm the repaired mechanism acquired the same peculiar double presence as the bell: metal performing an action, and a place in his graft where that action might be reproduced.
He stopped winding.
Sera’s expression sharpened. “Keep the load supported. Let the pattern settle.”
He did not snatch for it. He followed the pull from the handle into the gearing, along the line, back into the base. The whole action had somewhere to go.
His left forearm warmed.
There. A second shape, distinct from the bell’s flexing note.
He lowered the basket and found he was smiling again.
Derrit looked from him to Sera. “Does that mean it costs extra?”
“It means,” Iven said, “you can stop buying crowbars.”
Sera took him to a clear stretch of boardwalk. She had brought a stout rope and a small loaded cart. He thought about the ward rescue and the weight of the cages, about the licensed restorer he had once watched draw a crane arm into position.
He wanted to pull something substantial.
She pointed to a ring in the supporting ridge.
“Anchor yourself.”
He looped the rope around his waist and tied it to the ring. She checked his knot without comment. Then he stood three paces from the cart and seated the new pattern beside the bell.
The warmth in his arm divided, not into two arms but into two possible actions. He held one ready and let the other wait.
He reached toward the cart and pulled.
It moved six inches.
He moved nearly a foot.
The waist rope caught him before he hit it.
Derrit laughed from the hatch. Iven decided the man could pay extra after all.
“What happened?” Sera asked.
“My base was walking around on two feet.”
“Again.”
He changed his stance, took the slack out of the anchor, and used a shorter pull. The cart rolled toward him. Its wheels hummed over the boards. He stopped before it reached his shins.
There had been no hidden knife behind his ear.
His arm was warm. His shoulders had worked. The cart stood somewhere it had not stood before because he had understood a broken machine well enough to learn its action.
“Again,” he said.
This time she smiled openly.
They tested direction, distance, and several small loads. She stopped him when his forearm began trembling. He resented the interruption until she showed him the gauge. He had been spending faster than he realized.
“You get stronger by doing the work and recovering,” she said. “Not by turning an interesting morning into a torn muscle.”
He helped put the cart away using his ordinary hands.
Sera left him to clean the worksite while she went to check a nearby collecting bed. Derrit brought a second tin of food and sat with his feet over the closed hatch.
“First one?” he asked.
Iven glanced at the winch.
“First graft,” Derrit said.
“Shows, does it?”
“You keep watching your own hand. My nephew did that when he got a proper saw.”
He offered the tin. Inside were pieces of pickled root and some firm white cheese. Iven accepted one of each. The root tasted of salt, vinegar, and an argument the vinegar had lost.
“You always work down here?” he asked.
“Thirty-one years. Not always this hatch.”
“Does it get ordinary?”
Derrit followed his gaze into the great dim chamber beyond the walkway. Water passed somewhere under the growths, too large a movement for the little channels Iven could see.
“Most of it. Then you go somewhere you haven’t been, or something changes. Last wet season a whole set of leaves started turning yellow at once. Never seen it before. Board told us it was the rinse mixture. We changed the mixture.”
“Did they turn green again?”
“New ones did. Old ones fell.”
“That’s not much of an answer.”
“No. But it was enough to keep working.”
Sera returned carrying a glass sample bottle. She had dirt on one sleeve and a small green seed stuck near her collar. Iven reached toward it, caught himself, and pointed instead. She brushed it away.
“What are you collecting?” he asked.
“Something from a healthy bed to compare with a sick one.”
Derrit tapped his tin with the spoon. “She’s been saying that for years. We give her bottles. She comes back and tells us to change things nobody thought mattered.”
“Do they matter?”
The man considered. “Fewer sores on the lower growths since we moved the waste pipe. That mattered to the people cutting them out.”
Iven looked at the collecting bed with new interest. The neatly labeled supply lines above his streets had led him to imagine a neat beginning somewhere down below: a reservoir, a pumping room, an arrangement a mechanic could point to on a drawing. Here one channel warmed another, something alive filtered water, and roots thick as his body joined structures whose far ends he could not see.
He wanted to stay long enough to follow one.
“Next time,” Sera said, recognizing the look.
“There’s a next time?”
“There is more work than competent hands. If you keep your hands competent, yes.”
Derrit shut the tin and climbed to his feet. He collected every loose washer from the boards before putting the worksite away. One had rolled beneath a lamp bracket; he took the trouble to retrieve it with a bent wire.
Iven remembered the box of scrap at the entrance. These people kept rules because they had reasons for them. He could learn the reasons before deciding which rules deserved breaking.
It was a pleasant thought until he remembered how many rules he had broken getting the graft in the first place.
Derrit paid him at the hatch. Then he asked if Iven could come back to inspect the lifting frame’s lower guide. It had begun sticking at the far end, and nobody wanted to climb down into the service bend while the scheduled feed rinse was running.
Iven looked at Sera.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “With the rinse stopped.”
Derrit scratched his jaw. “I’ll get it stopped.”
“Before we arrive,” she added.
On the way out, Iven paused beside the bed of small green leaves. A white shape moved underneath them, quick enough to make him think of a rat. It vanished behind a root before he could see it properly.
He crouched.
The leaves trembled once and settled.
“What lives in there?”
Sera came back to his side. She did not crouch close to the bed.
“A number of things. Don’t put your hand in.”
From somewhere below the boardwalk came a hard little clicking sound.
Iven straightened slowly.
For the first time since entering the greenway, he noticed that every lamp faced the path. Beyond their reach, Mercy’s enormous living interior continued in darkness.
He was very glad the new pattern had stayed with him.