Frank took three buckets up to the second floor. The cart would carry four, but the rear wheel had started complaining on corners, and he had no desire to spend his morning doing axle repairs in a corridor full of blood. He put ORGANIC on the left, ALCHEMICAL on the right, and the unmarked water bucket in the middle, where the handle wouldn't catch on the tool rack. There had been an argument about that third bucket's label years ago. Somebody from Sanitation had decided plain water needed its own permit, and somebody else had scraped the label off in protest.
Dispatch claimed the east corridor was empty. The adventurers assigned to the floor were supposed to be fighting in the west wing, although Frank had long since given up believing that a party of armed strangers would go where the schedule told them. He checked the service door for damage, set a chock behind it and waited through a distant clanging noise before bringing the cart inside.
Green blood swept along the grout in the sort of wide marks a wounded goblin would leave trying to keep his balance. Under a dented breastplate near the bend lay a red stain, darker at its edge where the stone had drunk it in. Something purple had splattered the ceiling and was quietly taking the plaster apart. Two crumbs fell from the ceiling beside his cart. A muddy boot print crossed a patch of slime that hadn't decided whether to flow downhill or crawl toward the light.
He'd worked with most of these messes. The green would lift if he got to it early. The red required its own record because a person might have died there. The purple was eating plaster, and no amount of urgency from Dispatch would make him put a brush to it before somebody identified it. He moved the bucket beneath the falling crumbs and sent a hazard notice rather than start with the easiest stain.
Frank raised his lantern and caught a sample in a stoppered jar. The residue made a faint fizz against the glass, the kind of sound that could indicate a harmless reaction or a reason to evacuate the whole corridor. He set the jar in a ceramic tray, well away from the other buckets.
"Tell me that's not acid on my wall."
Eda stood in the service doorway wearing a leather apron dusted with pale mortar. She was a round-shouldered dwarf, older than most of the dungeon's additions, and she tended to identify masonry by when she'd laid it rather than by which floor management believed it belonged to. The hammer in her hand was not raised, but Frank knew her well enough to recognize a threat to the wall when he heard one.
"Don't know what it is yet," he told her. "I took a sample. Something up there is eating the plaster."
She joined him beneath the damaged stretch, planted one boot outside the splash marks and studied the holes. "That's the old lime mix. I begged them not to put it beside the alchemist rooms. They told me nobody was going to be throwing potions at the ceiling."
"Somebody was last night." Frank passed her the jar, warning her about the fizz. She turned it toward the lantern and watched a few grains sink.
"I saw a grenade go off on the viewing glass. Purple one, I think, after the first orange blast. Whatever they've been carrying, Loot might have picked up the bottles." She looked along the edge of the stained ceiling and frowned. "Construction wants to patch this before supper. I'm telling them to keep their bloody hands off it until we know what made the holes."
Frank pointed out the crack running into the adjoining wall. He had not yet decided whether it was new, and Eda didn't pretend to know at a glance. She took the jar to compare with the original plaster in her notes, helped him ease the bent armor away without grinding its edges into the floor, and went off toward the next chamber with her hammer tapping against her thigh.
"Bring that jar back," Frank called after her.
"I'm not keeping your pretty little jar, Frank." Her voice came back down the passage, already occupied with something else. "I've got shelves full of the things."
He began on the green residue. Rather than wash it toward the drain and create a future blockage, he scattered absorbent grit along the thickest edge, let it bind, then drew it together a strip at a time. The scraper caught in an old nick in the floor. Frank worked it loose, adjusted his grip and went around the scar. He had put that nick there himself twelve years before while shifting a damaged support, and no one had agreed whose department should pay to have it polished out.
Two Monster Operations workers rounded the bend with a stretcher between them. The goblin lying on it was bundled in a cloak that didn't quite cover the bandage around his middle. One carrier slowed at the sight of the green blood on the floor, and his face changed before he spoke.
"That's Perek's," he said.
"Thought he was working the south alcove," Frank said.
"Was. Party came right through the wall with a blasting rune. Perek was standing on the other side trying to get the latch unstuck." The carrier tightened his hold on the stretcher. "We reported that access wall last week."
"They told us to improvise," Perek murmured without opening his eyes.
"You did," said the man at his feet. "You got out. Save the talking."
Perek made a small, irritated movement of his hand, which appeared to be all the argument he could manage. Frank shifted the cart back into the recess so they could pass without dragging the stretcher against the contaminated floor. The carrier nearest him said thanks without quite meeting his eyes. The carrier's shoulders stayed rigid even after the stretcher passed.
Afterward Frank found himself looking at the two tracks left by the stretcher wheels. Perek had worked that floor long enough to know the alternate exits, but a charge through the wall had rendered the map useless. A competent worker could only plan around the hazards somebody admitted existed. Frank used his chalk to mark the crack, and underneath it he wrote DO NOT LOAD WALL, though he didn't yet know whether it was carrying anything.
A young goblin came hurrying from the supply route with a sack of clean rags dragging against his knees. Perek's younger brother had been assigned light duties upstairs for barely a month, and the oversized smock they had issued him caught on every door latch. He set the rags on the cart and stayed where he was, staring at the smear beside Frank's scraper.
"They said he got hurt," the boy said. "Perek. They wouldn't tell me how bad."
"He was talking when they brought him past. Took him straight down to medical."
"He always talks. He talks when he's asleep." The boy worried at a loose thread on his cuff. "He said this was going to be a safe shift."
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Perek had managed a few words on the stretcher. Frank wanted to offer the brother something better than that, but there was no report from medical yet and no promise he had the right to make. “I can't tell you he's all right,” he said. “I saw him alive on the stretcher. They were taking him downstairs. You can ask Medical when they let you off shift.”
The boy nodded, though he still looked at the floor. His hand drifted toward the blood. Frank moved the bag of rags between them before the small fingers reached it.
"Leave that. There's alchemical stuff mixed in with it. You don't want it on your clothes."
"That's his blood."
"I know whose it is." Frank heard his own sharpness and let go of the sack. "Sorry. I shouldn't have said it that way. Come on. I'll show you where the clean sink is."
He resumed the work, keeping the green residue away from the fresh crack. The scrape of his tool had a rhythm that helped when he didn't know what to say. Halfway through the next strip, he stopped and wrote PEREK INJURED next to the damaged access wall. It wasn't an engineering diagnosis. It was the reason the report needed to be read by someone with authority to change the route.
The runner from Lost Property arrived at midday carrying an alchemist's satchel by the very tips of two fingers. His sleeve had a dark hole in it, and the skin showing through looked angry and shiny.
"Don't put that down on the stone," Frank said. He pushed a ceramic tray across the cart top. The runner dropped the bag into it and stepped away so fast his heel caught the bucket wheel.
"Latch said it was urgent," the runner blurted. "He didn't mention the bottle was still leaking. I couldn't find a cart."
"Did it get on your hand?"
The young man flexed his fingers and looked at the burn as though noticing it properly for the first time. "Some. Didn't sting until I got to the stairs."
Frank pointed him toward the wash station. "Water first, then medical. Tell them exactly what touched you, not what you think was in the bag. And don't let anyone give you another delivery on the way."
The runner opened his mouth to argue, seemed to decide against it, and hurried off. Frank waited until he was out of the passage before opening the satchel with tongs. Five vials sat in padded loops. One had split along the neck, eating away enough of its label to make the warning nearly illegible. The rest identified a reagent that corroded magical bindings. It had apparently found a way to dislike mortar as well.
Eda returned with the sample jar and a paper packet of neutralizer. She read the surviving labels twice, then swore at the ceiling. Construction had wanted a fast patch before supper. Eda wouldn't approve one over an active reagent, even after the Core offered to classify the discoloration as cosmetic.
"The old plaster's buying us time," she said. "It's got salts in it. You put the newer repair compound over this and you'd trap the reagent inside. Give it a week and the whole patch could come away." She measured a mild neutralizer into the tray, then made Frank wait while she tested a corner where no one had painted over the stone.
"You want to try that on the red stain?" he asked.
"Not unless you want it there forever." She sounded offended that he'd ask, but he could tell from her face she was relieved the reagent hadn't made it into the supporting joint.
They worked overhead with a plank to catch falling droplets. The first application foamed, then gradually subsided. Frank held the lantern while Eda checked the pinholes from two angles, their shadows crawling up the wall whenever somebody passed the doorway. She made them wait through a quarter hour of silence and tested again. Only then did she permit him to clear the contaminated grit and seal the collection bag. Eda wrote the position in her notebook with a heavy hand and said she'd return after the next raid. She didn't promise the plaster would last.
Beneath the damaged suit of mail, the red blood had formed a line along the grout. Frank worked his scraper beneath the armor without disturbing what might be trapped inside it. A stitched label on the breast strap read G.H. Between the lining and the metal someone had tucked a folded scrap of cloth, protected from the blood by accident rather than design.
It was a child's drawing. A crooked yellow sun shone over a woman standing beside a dog with ears far too big for its body. The cloth had been folded and unfolded so often that a crease ran through the woman's face.
Frank spread it flat between two clean boards for a moment. He couldn't remember carrying anything from his own life into the dungeon. Maybe he'd arrived with a pocket full of possessions, maybe not; there was no way to ask. The drawing belonged to somebody who might still have a use for it. He set it on the dry shelf beneath his notebook, wrote G.H. and the recovery location on a return slip, and got back to the blood before it could sink any farther into the stone.
A heavy impact shook the west service door, followed by running boots on the other side of the wall. Frank checked the locking pin. The door was secure, but the public reset gate beyond it had dropped earlier than scheduled; he could hear its chain scraping against the stops.
He crossed to a narrow inspection grille that looked into the encounter passage without opening onto it. Three adventurers stood beyond the gate, one bleeding from a cut above his eyebrow and another dragging a shield whose rim scraped the stone. The woman behind them laughed once, abruptly, then covered her mouth. She was looking at a stain on the floor as though she feared finding out whose blood it was.
"Is there another way out?" she asked her companions. The shield bearer tested a painted arrow, while the wounded man kept staring at the locked gate. None of them knew a maintenance worker was on the other side of the wall.
Frank checked the route board bolted beneath the grille. The public stair was around the next bend, but the sign pointing toward it had been turned backward during the reset. He reached the staff-side control for the direction lamp and rotated its shutter until the EXIT marker illuminated the safe turn. It was meant to be part of the public sequence, not a signal anyone should have to operate by hand.
No one answered him. From the staff side, Frank watched their shadows pass the EXIT lamp and wondered how many other direction plates Dispatch had reset backward.
Frank remained by the grille until the adventurers reached the public stairs. He could correct the direction lamp from the staff side but could not fix the reset schedule. He recorded both defects. The next party might be less lucky with the reversed sign, and Dispatch would call his notation excessive until someone fell through a doorway.
The shift bell sounded while Frank was separating the last of the red stain from the green crust. He stayed until the floor was clear, then washed down his tools over the collection tray so he wouldn't leave the residue for somebody else's hands. Eda had fitted a temporary timber brace against the cracked wall and signed the restriction notice. The passage could be used by authorized workers on the safe side, but she wasn't calling the stone repaired.
Two contributions appeared on Frank's ledger: cleanup and the identification and containment of the alchemical hazard.
SHIFT CONTRIBUTION
Biological cleanup
+12 XP
Chemical identification and containment
+15 XP
Experience total
87 / 500 XP
Pending repair
EAST WALL CRACK; CONSTRUCTION ASSIGNED
The numbers faded while Frank loaded his contaminated tools. Twenty-seven points for separating waste and keeping a failing wall closed, with Eda still due back to test the masonry. He wrote the XP on one page and the unresolved crack on another. Neither entry repaired the wall, but only one of them would earn him a promotion.
Latch received the dented mail and the folded drawing at a counter already crowded with things nobody had asked him to find. He took the return slip, examined the initials, then read the line about the drawing. For once he didn't launch into an argument over which bin it belonged in. He found a clean envelope, slipped the cloth inside and wrote the location on it himself. Latch put the envelope in the back drawer, away from the wet armor, and wrote the drawer number on Frank's receipt before anyone could ask him to move it.
In his quarters that evening, Frank set his chisel across his knees and found a dried fleck of purple reagent near the handle. He worked it loose with a brush. The little drawing was safe in Latch's drawer, but the child's yellow sun stayed in his thoughts. Someone had folded that cloth often enough to wear a crease through a face.
He couldn't remember whether he'd ever carried anything into the dungeon. If he had, someone else had done the sorting twenty years ago. He wondered what had been thrown away, and found he had no useful work order to write about it.
He cleaned the tool and set it aside. Eda would test the wall tomorrow. Perek might be alive; the report might still be sitting in a tray. Frank found he could bear not knowing the structural result until morning. The other uncertainty had no such convenient inspection time.