The list of missing people had become shorter by morning, and the list of dead had become longer.
Asa kept them on separate sheets. The first lay on the kitchen table beneath a cup to stop the draft from lifting it. The second was folded beside her hand. She did not let anyone turn a missing name into a death until a body had been identified or a witness could say exactly what had happened.
“Four rooms still unchecked,” she told Iven. “Two behind the storehouse, one above the old laundry, and one under the east brace.”
“Who has the storehouse?”
“Neri’s crew. The laundry stair is blocked, but Jora has a team coming around the roof. The east brace is ours.”
“Ours?”
“Yours and mine. Brin knows the approach.”
Brin was at the door with a coil of rope over his shoulder. He looked as though he had slept in his clothes. Iven suspected he had not slept at all.
“Did Vale feed you?” Iven asked.
“Twice.”
“Did you sleep?”
“Some.”
Asa looked at him. “How much?”
“Enough to dream about being asked.”
Vale came from the stove carrying three bowls. “Sit. You’ll leave after you’ve eaten.”
Asa opened her mouth. Vale set a bowl in front of her.
“You too.”
They ate at the table while the kitchen filled with the smell of broth and toasted grain. Outside, workers moved timber toward the storehouse. The city had not returned to its ordinary rhythm, but it had stopped making the sharp sideways movement that had destroyed the lane. That gave the rescue teams a chance to enter places they had been forced to leave the previous day.
The east brace supported a row of small rooms built beneath a wider deck. One corner had dropped when the saddle shifted. A steel post now leaned against the room nearest the lane, trapping its door beneath a bent lintel.
Brin showed them the approach through a narrow alley. A neighbor met them with a key and a description of the occupant, a woman named Ysol who repaired clothes for the ward.
“She was inside when the deck moved,” the neighbor said. “I heard her call once. I couldn’t lift the post.”
“When?” Asa asked.
“Yesterday afternoon.”
“Has anyone heard her since?”
The neighbor shook his head.
Iven examined the post. It carried a section of the upper deck, but not the whole weight. If they moved it without replacing the load path, the deck edge could drop farther. He set his gauge against the base plate and found two bolts still sound.
“Neri needs to see this,” he said.
The neighbor’s face fell. “How long?”
“Long enough to keep the room from coming down on her.”
Brin ran for Neri. Iven and Asa cleared loose boards from the entrance while they waited. The neighbor brought a length of timber from his own workshop and offered it without being asked for a receipt.
“You’ll get it back if we can,” Iven said.
“Get her out first.”
Neri arrived with Dessa and a small jack. She checked the post, then the deck above it. “We can take the weight on the jack and a diagonal shore. The room itself may still be unsafe.”
“Can you make a route through the side wall?” Iven asked.
“Maybe. It’s lighter than the front.”
They worked from opposite sides. Dessa and the neighbor fitted the jack beneath a sound beam. Neri placed the timber diagonally against the deck frame. Iven used clamp bridge briefly to hold the post while they drove wedges. The graft helped them position the support; the jack and timber carried the load once it was in place.
The side wall was made of thin boards over a frame. Iven removed them one at a time rather than striking through blindly. Behind the third board, he saw a shelf of folded cloth. Behind the fourth, he saw Ysol on the floor.
She was alive. Her breathing was shallow, and her lower leg lay beneath a fallen sewing table.
“Sera!” Asa called.
The doctor had been waiting at the alley entrance with her case. She came through the opening, checked Ysol’s pulse, and directed Iven to lift the table only enough to free the leg. Neri watched the upper deck while he did it.
Ysol’s leg was badly injured. Sera splinted it before they moved her. The neighbor helped carry the stretcher. Ysol opened her eyes once and asked whether the cloth on the shelf had burned.
“No,” Asa said. “It’s still there.”
“Don’t let it get wet.”
“We won’t.”
They carried her toward Cage Seven. At the corner, a group of workers came from the storehouse carrying a covered stretcher. Neri stopped long enough to ask the foreman what they had found.
“Two dead,” he said. “One room still to check.”
Asa wrote the information on her list and asked for names. The foreman gave one. The second had not yet been identified. She marked it as unknown rather than guessing.
A bell sounded from the lower heat stair: three quick strikes, the signal Brell’s crew used for a blocked route. Kesh came up the lane at a run.
“The passage below the east brace has opened,” she said. “Creatures are coming through. Two workers are trapped on the other side of the service door.”
“Are they injured?” Iven asked.
“One can walk. The other can’t.”
Neri looked at the shored room. “The support will hold without me for a few minutes.”
“No,” Iven said. “You keep it standing. I’ll go with Kesh.”
She met his eyes, then nodded. “Don’t use the upper beam as an anchor. It moved when we set the jack.”
Kesh led him to the heat stair. The service door stood half open. Beyond it, a narrow corridor ran between pipes and a wall of pale, ridged tissue. One creature blocked the passage near the door. Another moved farther back, where a worker sat with his companion beside him.
The worker who could walk shouted, “We can’t get around them.”
Iven seated plate brace, piston strike, and spring step. Kesh held her shield low and pointed to a side opening in the wall.
“The second one came from there,” she said. “If it goes back, we may have a path.”
The first creature turned toward their voices. It had a broad armored head and a broken ridge along its back. Iven had no reason to think it was the same creature he had fought before. It was dangerous enough on its own.
He stepped through the door and drew its attention away from the workers. Kesh stayed near the threshold, ready to cover their retreat. The creature lunged. Iven caught the impact on his brace and used spring step to move sideways along the pipe wall. The creature followed, its hooked feet finding the grating.
The corridor was too narrow for a long exchange. Iven struck its forelimb joint with a piston impulse. The creature reeled but recovered. He moved again, forcing it to turn away from the trapped workers.
“Kesh!”
She entered with her shield raised. The second creature climbed onto a pipe support and dropped toward her. She caught it on the shield, staggered, and drove it back with the rim. The uninjured worker used the opening to pull his companion toward the door.
The first creature came at Iven again. He waited until its weight committed to the lunge, then stepped across its path. His brace redirected the head into a sound support post. He struck the same leg joint a second time. The limb folded, and the creature fell against the grating.
The second creature pushed past Kesh. Iven turned and hit it with a short, direct piston strike to the shoulder. The blow drove it into the side opening. It tried to climb out, and Kesh closed the hinged service panel over the gap. The panel had not been designed as a cage; it held long enough for the workers to clear the corridor.
Iven backed toward the door. The first creature remained on the floor, moving but unable to rise quickly. He did not follow it. He and Kesh pulled the service door shut and dropped the bar into place.
The injured worker had a fractured ankle. Sera splinted it at the top of the stair. The other worker sat with his head between his knees until Brell brought him water.
“Did we get everyone?” he asked.
“We got the two of you,” she said. “The next crew will check the other passage when it’s safe.”
By afternoon, the final room behind the storehouse had been opened. No one remained alive inside. Jora’s roof team found the laundry room empty and its occupant at a relative’s home. The uncertainty did not disappear all at once. Each answer had to be checked against another list, another witness, another person who might have been taken to a clinic without a name.
Before leaving the storehouse, Neri took the foreman through the ruined rear room. A broken brace had punched through a shelf, and sacks of grain lay in a dark drift beneath it. He wanted to send workers in for the grain immediately.
“Not until we support that corner,” she said.
“It’s food.”
“And they’re people.” She showed him the cracked joint and the narrow space where a prop could take the load. “Give me a crew for half an hour. Then you can recover what isn’t spoiled.”
He did. The prop went in before anyone crawled under the shelf. They saved several sacks and found another that had torn open into dirty water. Vale accepted the sound grain and told them to keep the spoiled sack separate. Hunger did not make it clean.
Elian came to the kitchen with reports from the other saddles. He laid them beside Asa’s sheets. The numbers were estimates: identified deaths, unidentified bodies, and households that had not yet reported. The combined count was approaching four hundred.
“Not all confirmed,” he said.
Asa looked at the figures. “Write that beside the total.”
He did. The estimate did not include the nine workers who had died at the Sixth Lift pump months earlier. Those names belonged to a different disaster and a different account. Iven knew one of them by heart; he did not add it to this list merely because the numbers hurt to look at.
Vale set a bowl in front of Elian. He stared at it as if he had forgotten what food was for.
“Eat,” she said.
He did.
Outside, Neri’s crew finished the temporary shore at the east brace. The neighbor who had provided the timber returned with a second piece for the storehouse. No one had asked him to. He set it down and went back for his tools.
Tavin reported that Cage Seven had completed its final emergency transfer for the day. The damaged guide wheel still needed replacement, but the reduced-load rule had kept it on the track. He would leave the cage ready overnight in case another rescue team needed it.
Sera checked Ysol at the clinic. Her leg would require surgery, but she was conscious and asking about the cloth on her shelf. Asa sent Brin to tell the neighbor to cover it against rain.
The immediate sweep had reached every known accessible room. That did not mean every missing person had been found. It meant the rescue crews could stop running blindly from one rumor to the next and begin checking the places that remained uncertain.
Iven stood in the kitchen doorway as evening light faded over Rung Ward. The list of dead lay folded beside Asa’s hand. The list of missing was shorter, though several names remained.
He had won a fight in the passage and helped bring two workers out. He had helped free Ysol. He had also seen bodies carried from rooms no one had reached in time. None of those facts canceled another.
Behind him, Vale called for the next pot to be brought in. People would need food tomorrow. The work of keeping them alive had not ended with the last sweep.