The well’s access terminal stood in the operations office at the end of the engineering hall, and it showed three seal slots.
The office was a glassed room off the hall’s far end, with a console against its back wall and a window looking down into a shaft. It was a service shaft beside the well, rather than the well itself, lined with pipes and cables, going down further than Mara could see. The console’s screen showed the well in schematic, the same drawing as on the hall’s board, and below it, three small rectangles. Empty. Each with a label beneath it in the old route format.
Seal: lamp gate.
Seal: forge.
Seal: maintenance.
Caldris stood beside the console, her slate held flat against her coat. Sera stood in the office door, where she could see the hall and the shaft both. A young woman in a Board clerk’s grey sat at a side desk with a slate and a relay headset: the Sunward Board’s clerk at Meridian, sent down from the Board’s office on the upper terraces when Caldris requested the public connection.
“The well’s lock,” Caldris said, “does not open on a rod alone.”
Mara studied the three empty slots.
