On day fourteen hundred and ninety-nine, Sera would not let the guards carry the regulator by its handles.
“The frame,” she said. “Two hands beneath the frame.”
One guard looked at the bright handles, then at the plain wooden carrying base. He changed his grip. The instrument went through the upper service station’s public door without knocking its newly fitted cover against the stone.
Lori had finished that cover weeks earlier. Now a person could inspect the contact seat without dismantling half the machine. Sera had spent too many years depending on instruments whose most important fault lived behind an impressive casing. She liked the little inspection flap more than any polished surface on the frame.
Doctor Emren Voss had kept Bracken’s clinic that morning. Sera had come to the upper station with one trained assistant, a local medical witness, and a cart of ordinary supplies. Jora’s watch knew their route. Ama had given them the current medical room plan and the places where heat remained in the floor after a return.
The journey by the long upper path had taken most of the morning. No one had carried the cart across the broken bridge.
At the service door, Superintendent Marr read the agreed purpose from his copy.
