The local watch approached the dry basin from above the public exit.
Iven walked on its left, where a broken wall gave him cover from the spring frame. He wore his boiler jacket seated beneath a bounded lattice, with turbine, compression lance, hammer, and hook filling the other four channels. His physical lance was assembled and locked. The new outer point had already cut practice steel; the sacrificial collar behind it remained unbroken.
Yara was not beside him.
Her unit held the marked transit road, where two handcarts of medicine and workshop parts had stopped behind the ridge. If the people in the basin fled toward that road, they would meet a defended position rather than civilian carriers. If they tried to draw Yara away, she had orders from her own judgment to stay.
Bracken’s watch keeper raised a plain white board.
“You’ve moved public markers and blocked a resting route,” he called. “Put the launcher down. We’ll hear your working claim outside the frame’s reach.”
The man beneath the cover looked up.
He was broad through the shoulders, with a pale cloth wrapped around his throat. He wore no visible graft cuff. One hand rested on a lever connected to the covered frame.
