Ama Renn arrived at the onion shed before its doors opened.
She carried the station’s warning striker in a cloth bag and a pair of dry socks tucked beneath one arm. The socks were for one of the workers who had left the upper station with her. He had found a bed at the cooper’s house, then discovered that the room’s washing line leaked directly onto his boots.
“Work first,” she told Hend when he came to the door. “Then you can tell me where everyone has been put.”
He took her inside.
The night crew had cleared a place on the wall beside Neri’s survey. Ama drew the upper gallery as she knew it: three service bays, two warning throats, the crowded warm return, the old passage narrowed by the later bridge conduit. Her hand slowed at the new steel housing.
“They’ll finish enclosing it today,” she said.
Hend looked at the drawing. “They can’t lift a catch we haven’t connected.”
“No. But they can raise the pressure in a shared receiving line while its old branch is still coupled. A closed handle isn’t the same as a blank across the pipe.”
