Derrit had stopped the rinse.
He had also tied a red cloth to the valve, locked the handle, and found someone to complain that the resulting delay was his fault. Iven took all three as signs of a promising start.
The lower guide stood at the bottom of a short service ladder, inside a chamber where the air was warm and damp enough to cling. The feed hatch cut a square of lamplight overhead. Beyond it, Derrit’s boots moved past in a slow procession of irritation.
Iven stood on the lifting frame and checked its supports. The winch above held them securely. Yesterday’s repair had removed the roughness from its movement, and he could feel a ridiculous pride in every smooth turn.
Sera descended behind him with her case. Two maintenance workers waited beside the guide. One carried a lamp; the other had been trying to clear the sticking track with a short drill.
Iven looked at the drill, then at the deep groove it had left beside the guide.
“Was that the part you intended to remove?” he asked.
“It was in the way,” the worker said.
Sera knelt near the groove. Beneath the scraped mineral coating the surface had a darker, wet appearance. She asked the worker to stop drilling until she had inspected it.
The man opened his mouth, glanced at her collarbone graft, and closed it again.
“The guide’s been shoved,” Iven said, looking underneath. “Something grew against the far support. You can see where the frame used to sit.”
There was room to reposition the shoe rather than cut deeper into the wall. He asked for wedges and a sound bolt. The lamp-holder climbed to fetch them.
The drill worker leaned his tool against the side of the chamber. His name was Noll, according to the tag on his coat. He watched Iven with the mixture of interest and annoyance tradesmen reserved for someone diagnosing their work too quickly.
“How long?” Noll asked.
“Longer if you stand on the shoe.”
Noll moved.
Iven crouched, inserted a drift, and began lifting the guide clear of the old fixing. The work was cramped but straightforward. He was halfway through drawing the first bolt when he heard the clicking.
Not below.
Above him, in the darkness beyond the lamp.
He stopped turning the spanner.
“Sera.”
She looked up. The sound came again, faster now, followed by the scrape of something hard against the chamber’s curved ceiling.
Noll reached for the drill.
“Leave it,” Sera said.
He picked it up anyway.
A pale shape dropped onto the frame.
Iven saw six jointed limbs, a low plated body, and a foreleg that ended in something between a claw and a chisel. Then the creature hit Noll, and there was no time to put it into categories.
The worker fell backward against the guide. His drill skittered across the floor. One chisel limb struck the metal hard enough to ring.
Sera caught Noll by the coat and dragged him clear of the next blow. The creature turned toward the moving drill.
Iven swung his spanner.
He hit a plate above its forelimb. The jolt ran up to his shoulder, numbing his fingers. The creature barely shifted. It came toward him with a speed that had no place in such a low, heavy body.
He scrambled behind the upright support.
The chisel limb struck where his knee had been.
He heard himself swear. It was reassuring to hear it, though the circumstances did not encourage celebration.
“Up the ladder,” Sera told Noll. “Use your good arm.”
Blood ran down the worker’s sleeve. Sera pressed a dressing against it, held it in place with the same fine force Iven had seen in the clinic, and pushed him toward the rungs.
The creature struck the support again.
A crack opened in its mineral coating. Underneath, something pale flexed.
Iven had an anchor behind his right heel and a short length of rope at his waist. He got the rope around the support without taking his eyes off the forelimbs. He could not pull the whole creature from across the room. He could change the direction of one moving part from three feet away.
He seated the winch pattern.
The first pull caught the attacking limb at its fullest extension and drew it sideways into the gap beside the guide.
The creature’s body twisted. Its other limbs braced against the floor.
Iven pulled again.
The waist rope bit. The support accepted the reaction. The trapped limb bent at an angle he did not think its joint was meant to hold.
It made a sound like dry stones ground together.
He felt the sound in his teeth.
He had hurt it.
The satisfaction lasted until the forelimb tore the edge off the guide and came free.
Iven stumbled backward. The rope stopped him short. He was now securely anchored to a place he very much wanted to leave.
The creature rushed him.
He struck the frame with a bell pulse.
The shock traveled through the metal into its planted feet. The pale body lifted a fraction, its grip breaking. Pressure stabbed behind Iven’s left ear, and the world lost its sharp edges again.
He had time to hate that, and no time to consider it.
He cut his waist rope with the folding blade in his tool roll and climbed onto the far rail. The creature turned, following the movement. Noll had reached the ladder. Sera stood below him, protecting his injured arm from the rungs.
She needed another few seconds.
Iven looked down at the displaced guide, the broken fixing, and the angled support where the creature had trapped its limb.
He did not need to break its armor.
He needed to get it into the wrong position.
“Derrit!” he shouted. “Raise the frame. One turn!”
The man above heard him. The cable tightened.
The lifting frame rose just enough to open a gap beside its lower stop.
Iven dropped a loose bolt into the gap. The creature followed the little impact with an abrupt turn. Its forward body came beneath the guide.
He used the winch pull on the damaged shoe, drawing it across the last few inches.
The shoe struck the creature’s forelimbs and pressed them against the support.
“Hold!” Iven shouted.
Derrit stopped the winch.
The creature thrashed. A second limb scraped through Iven’s coat, catching cloth and skin along his ribs. He planted his boot against sound metal, gripped the spanner with both hands, and drove its end into the joint exposed beneath the nearest plate.
The first blow slipped.
The second landed.
He hit it again before it could free the limb.
The body sagged. Its rear feet scrabbled against the floor. Iven stayed out of their reach, breathing too hard, and waited until the movement stopped.
Above him someone was shouting his name.
He looked up. Sera was on the ladder. She pointed to the creature, then the hatch.
He climbed.
At the top, Derrit caught his tool bag while Sera checked his side. The cut was shallow. His coat had taken most of the force. He found that irritating in a distant, unreasonable way; repairing the coat was going to take an hour.
Noll sat against the hatch frame, pale and furious. The lamp-holder crouched beside him, holding a clean cloth. They had both watched Iven come up.
“You killed it,” Derrit said.
Iven looked down at the bloody end of his spanner.
“Yes.”
His voice sounded odd in his damaged hearing.
“One of the tunnel hunters,” Noll said. “They’ve been coming near the work. Board says clear them when they do.”
Sera had moved to the edge of the hatch. She looked at the dead creature, then at the drill where it had fallen near the scraped wall.
“How often?” she asked.
“Often enough.”
“That is not a number.”
“I’m bleeding.”
She went back to him at once. “Then we’ll begin with that.”
They secured the hatch before carrying Noll out. Derrit wanted to leave the guide as it was. Iven made him block the lifting frame on sound stops first. The attack had ended; the damaged load path had not improved itself in gratitude.
Sera noticed him checking the final wedge.
“Still thinking?” she asked.
He wiped his spanner on a rag.
“Trying to.”
At the entrance, the gatekeeper took one look at Noll’s arm and went for a stretcher. A messenger left toward the lower board with Derrit’s account. Sera kept the wording narrow: pale armored animal, direct attack near a worksite, one injured worker, one dead animal. No species she had not identified. No explanation she had not tested.
Noll watched the messenger leave with an angry little movement of his jaw.
“They’ll close the hatch,” he said.
“It should be closed until we know what happened,” Sera answered.
“That feed line supplies two streets.”
“Then the board must provide another route.”
“You’ve met the board.”
Iven had. He looked toward the service diagram beside the entrance. The lower guide handled inspection access, not the full flow itself. There was a narrower access above the chamber, harder to use but outside the creature’s reach.
“You can take your checks from the high port,” he said. “It’ll mean two people and a different rod. You don’t need to open the hatch for every reading.”
Derrit followed the line on the diagram. “That’s never been convenient.”
“Neither was the thing downstairs.”
The man considered it, then went to find the gatekeeper’s pencil. He was already arguing about the extra shift by the time he reached the desk. Iven listened until it became clear he was asking for workers rather than permission to pretend nothing had happened.
Noll looked at the red stain on his sleeve.
“I didn’t see it come down,” he said more quietly.
“I heard it,” Iven said. “Barely.”
“I’d have kept standing there.”
Iven could still see the limb descending beside the man’s neck. An inch differently, and the dressing in Sera’s hands would have been useless.
“You got to the ladder,” he said.
Noll nodded once. He did not offer a speech of gratitude. He reached over with his good arm and pushed Iven’s tool bag closer to him, out of the path where the stretcher crew would pass.
Iven accepted that for what it was.
When Derrit returned, he put the repair payment into Iven’s hand and added enough for a new length of rope. Iven closed his fingers over the coins. He had not thought about the rope he had cut until that moment.
Tomorrow he could replace it. Today he was glad he had cut it.
Iven sat on a bench while she finished the dressing.
His hands shook now that they had nothing urgent to do. He pressed them against his knees until the trembling eased. The winch pattern remained under his skin, as distinct as before. He had used it in a fight. He could use it again.
He was afraid enough to know that was important.
Sera came to sit beside him. She did not tell him he had been brave.
“You used the support properly,” she said. “The second time.”
“I’ll put that in my advertisement.”
“Leave out the part where you tied yourself to the attack.”
He laughed once, involuntarily. It hurt his scratched side and cleared something unpleasant out of his chest.
She checked his hearing with a quiet word on either side, then made a note.
“We need to solve the return fault,” she said.
“I noticed.”
“That was useful work you did. It should not make you pay through your ears.”
He looked at her. She meant it as a repair problem, not a promise made to quiet him.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s solve it.”
They started toward the borrowed clinic as the first evening lamps came on. Mercy moved beneath them. The noise of the city was muffled, but Iven could feel the familiar adjustments in the boards under his boots. He had spent the day inside the immense creature that made those movements possible. He could not look at the street’s foundations in quite the same way.
Near the clinic stair, a lower-board runner passed them at a trot. Brin came after him, waving a folded slip.
“Go up,” he told Sera. “I’ll bring them.”
“Bring who?”
The boy looked back toward the street, where a woman stood gripping her own elbows.
“Maintenance crew came out of the filter route short a person. They’re trying to find someone who’ll go back.”
Sera held the clinic key a little tighter.
“Get the partner,” she said. “I’ll open up.”
Iven looked at his arm, then at the woman waiting in the street.
The day had not finished with him after all.