Frank could tell the corpse runoff drain was clogged before he reached Corpse Processing. A strip of pinkish water had crept around the corner and was slowly occupying the grout lines of the service corridor, carrying bits of cloth and a gray foam he preferred not to identify without gloves. Someone had posted DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION on the processing-room door. Beneath it, in cramped handwriting, somebody else had added PLEASE COME IN IF YOU KNOW HOW TO FIX THE DRAIN.
The second notice was more useful than the first. A corpse cart stood outside the room with one wheel propped on scrap timber. Two waiting goblins had been told to stand by until someone found another route. One had tied his apron over his nose. Frank wondered how long they'd tried to avoid breathing before he remembered they weren't skeletons, and couldn't.
"Don't roll that over the spill," he told them as he came up. "If the wheel drops into that open joint, I'll have two jobs instead of one."
"We're not going anywhere," the taller goblin said. His hand stayed on the cart handle. "They won't let us unload."
Two buckets sat beneath a leaking joint. Both were full enough to tremble when another drop fell, and a third lay on its side in the doorway. Frank put his own cart beyond the wet area, checked the level of the floor with the heel of his boot, and found the upstream shutoff before touching any of the covers. No matter what the Core put in the emergency notice, reopening the line was not the first job. Keeping the stuff from spreading into the staff corridor was.
Frank kept his own map of the old plumbing. It wasn't official; nobody had approved the ink and measuring string it would have taken to draw one to scale. But he knew the bends where grit collected, the cleanouts that didn't exist, and the stems that broke if turned without patience. Five departments now shared a line designed when there were barely a dozen rooms. Three still denied using it.
The shutoff wheel resisted his first attempt. He braced one bony foot against the wall and eased the handle backward before turning it forward again. A squeal traveled through the pipe. The pressure dropped enough for the spill to slow to a drip.
"If that holds, you'll have saved me from closing the entire room," Nera said from the processing doorway. She had her ledger tucked under one arm and a strip of waxed paper stuck to the front of her apron. Frank recognized the paper as a temporary label. It had been corrected so many times that hardly any blank space remained.
"Only slowed it down," he said. "What went through this line since last night? I want the actual list, not the list on the notice."
Nera looked past him at the loaded cart. "Two orcs, a human, four goblins, and some pieces nobody's been able to match yet. Then a construct shell arrived in a crate marked soft tissue. The chute crew sent it along without opening the lid."
Frank held his lamp over the cleanout. "That won't have done the old grate any favors."
"It wasn't meant for us." Nera flipped the ledger back with one hand. "No signature, either. The holding trays are filling and the next deliveries are waiting in the hall. Management wants to know when we can increase intake. I told them I'd ask the plumber, which I suppose is you."
"Until I know where the blockage is, intake is closed. I can give you an honest estimate once I have the bend open."
Nera stopped turning pages. She'd expected him to argue with the schedule, and the absence of an argument seemed to take a moment to register. "All right. I'll move the waiting carts to the dry side and have somebody tell the lower chute. Don't let anyone talk you into opening that valve while I'm gone."
Frank eased off the cleanout cover over a tarp, letting the pressure settle before lifting it clear. A black wad emerged, followed by chain and wire wound through decaying cloth. The metal was familiar enough to make him regret the last construct shipment.
"Thought that crate was supposed to be soft tissue," one of the waiting workers said.
"So did the fellow who wrote the label," Frank replied, and set the wire on the tarp rather than flinging it into the common waste bin. There would be a conversation about that later. At the moment something further along the pipe was moving, and the movement had a rhythm no blockage ought to have.
A faint scratching came from deeper in the pipe.
Frank drew the hook away from the opening. He had learned not to reach blind into anything that scratched. A living rat might bite. A trap mechanism might snap shut. Some creatures were perfectly capable of lying in wait inside sewage because they had evolved without standards.
He lowered his lamp, holding it far enough away that reflected light ran along the wet curve of the iron. Something moved behind the next bend. A black eye caught the glow, then disappeared.
"Rat, probably," Frank said. He kept the hook out of the opening and angled his lamp farther down the bend.
Nera, back from the corridor, stayed at the doorway. "Living?"
"Wouldn't bet on it. A live one shouldn't have lasted in this line, and a dead one shouldn't be backing away from my light."
The scratching came again, followed by two squeaks. Frank had cleared hundreds of blockages by pushing a rod into the middle of them. Today, that would pin a living thing against the grate or force it deeper into a pipe he couldn't open. Nera's intake carts waited outside, but he set the rod down and took out the small cleanout key instead.
Frank eased the cleanout key against the next port and worked the last seized bolt. The wrench slipped twice. He applied oil, adjusted his grip and waited for the metal to give. A scrape sounded inside the pipe. Nera leaned forward before she remembered how close she stood to the runoff.
"Could you get me one of those little glowstone wands?" he asked. "Not the broad one. If there's a foot caught under the grate, I need to see what I'm moving."
Nera went to fetch it without asking what sort of foot he meant.
When Nera returned with a glowstone wand, Frank pushed it into the open pipe and finally saw the creature clearly. A rat crouched on top of a bent grate behind a mass of decaying cloth. Its left flank carried a thick mat of gray fur. Along the right side, patches of skin had rotted away, leaving ribs visible beneath a loose strip of hide. One ear was ragged, its tail showed exposed bone near the tip, and two of its front toes were nothing but small white joints.
The rat followed the moving lamp with its dark eyes, and when Frank lowered the light it shifted its body to keep the beam in view. He did not mistake that attention for friendliness, but it was more deliberate than he expected from a creature in such a condition.
"He's trying to get out," Frank said. The creature had turned toward his voice and was testing the wire loop with its good foot. "I don't know who animated him, but somebody certainly left him in a bad place."
"Corpse Processing doesn't reanimate pests," Nera said. "If this one's from Monster Operations, they'll have to explain how he got into my drain." She watched the rat try the wire again, then stepped back to give Frank room for the cutters. She wasn't about to reach into the pipe herself, and Frank hadn't asked her to.
"Easy," Frank told it. "I'm not pulling on you."
He used a pair of long tongs to catch the wire just beyond the creature's foot. The loop tightened when he moved it, so he shifted his grip and pushed the wire backward toward the joint from which it had broken. The rat remained still. Its mouth opened, showing small teeth and a black tongue that didn't quite fill the shape of its jaw.
Stolen story; please report.
"You ever see an undead rat before?" Nera asked.
"Not one that was this interested in getting out."
"Could be feral maintenance waste."
"Could be."
Frank took a narrow pair of cutters and snipped the loop at a point where the metal would not spring against the trapped leg. The rat jerked free and climbed across the grate toward the light. He expected it to race straight out of the pipe. Instead it paused beside the damaged bracket and nosed a small brass washer from the sludge.
The rat nosed at a washer lodged under the bent grate. It did not pick up the obvious bright thing and run. Instead it shoved against the metal until the washer tipped free of the sludge, then waited where Frank could reach it.
The washer rolled to the lip of the port. Frank caught it on his glove and set it beside the bent fastening that had come out with the clog. The rat stayed at the grate, still looking toward the hidden support.
"Where'd that come loose?" he asked.
"Squeak."
"No, I can see you found it in there. Show me which side."
The animal went back along the slanted grate and scratched at a small cavity above the bracket. It was an awkward place to look from the floor, and Frank had to turn the lamp upside down to catch the reflection from a second loose bolt. The bracket had cracked around one of its anchors. He had been pulling plugs from the same bend for years, and all that time a gap behind the grate had been catching the waste and starting them again.
"Well, damn," Frank murmured. He tried the bracket with a probe, then passed the tool to Nera so she could feel the play for herself. "It's been hanging from one sound bolt. We could clear this line every day and it'd still trap half of what goes through."
"Can you straighten it with him in there?" she asked.
"Not while he's standing on it. Give me a moment."
Frank laid his palm open at the lip of the port, making a bridge to the dry edge of the tarp. The rat watched him with an unsettling steadiness. A few of its toes were white bone, the rest covered in clumped gray fur, and one hind leg was still trembling from where the wire had held it. Frank couldn't offer the sort of soothing touch a living animal might have wanted, assuming this one wanted it at all. He simply held still until the creature decided to put a paw on his finger.
The step onto his hand was tentative; the scramble up his wrist was not. By the time Nera retrieved an empty wooden tray to carry him away from the work area, the rat had already taken a position beside Frank's tool cart, where several spare washers caught the lamplight.
"We'll call that safer," Nera said.
The rat chose the smallest washer and held it between its teeth.
RB'S THOUGHTS
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
"That one belongs on the cart," Frank told him. "I've got receipts for the things I already own. Don't make me start another set."
Nera laughed once, abruptly enough that the rat flattened its damaged ear. Frank had rarely heard her laugh at work. She looked embarrassed for an instant, then laughed again at the sight of the washer still firmly in the creature's mouth.
Frank set the grate in a salvage bracket and ran a controlled test. The water cleared until a marrow bone caught at the downstream elbow, beyond where he could reach without a second opening. Nera cursed the intake label and refused to put another cart through. A repaired bracket had not made the department's handling rules any wiser.
The downstream elbow was buried in a service niche barely wide enough for his shoulders. He went in backward, tore an apron button on a bolt, and left the button where it fell.
They cleared the elbow through its proper port and sent a measured load through the pipe. This time the outflow stayed steady.
While Nera prepared the final surge, the rat attempted to drag a small screwdriver beneath the cart. The screwdriver scraped against the cart wheel. Frank held out his hand; the creature adjusted its grip and tried to pull harder. Eventually the screwdriver landed in his palm, followed a moment later by the string the rat had been allowed to keep.
"You can keep the string," Frank said. The rat took it back immediately. That was the closest they'd come to an agreement, and Frank had been at union meetings that accomplished less.
Nera ran the final surge through the line herself. When the outflow held steady, she signed off the closure notice with a pen whose nib had been repaired twice. She moved the next intake time back into its proper column, ignoring the optimistic reopening estimate management had requested. A worker who'd been waiting with the same body cart since breakfast came over to thank him, then turned and got on with his job before Frank could think of anything useful to say. There was still filth on the floor and the covers needed tightening, but the pressure was back where it belonged.
"If anyone sends another construct through that chute," Nera told him, "I'll put the crate on their desk and let them explain where they want the knee joint."
"That might get it fixed quicker," Frank said.
"It might also get me written up. I'll start with a report."
He wrote down the XP beside the bracket dimensions, not as proof the repair would last but as a reminder of how long it had taken to find the actual failure. The rat was perched on the cart with its stolen string. Frank supposed thirty-seven XP was a fair enough payment for a day that had ended with an extra set of feet following him home.
At the service door he found the rat still on the cart, perched beside the string. Frank had half expected it to disappear into another drain as soon as no one was looking. Instead it hopped down when he picked up his toolbox, landed awkwardly on the bad leg, and waited for him to start walking.
"I'm going upstairs," Frank told it. "There's nothing up there for a rat."
"Squeak."
"That's your considered opinion, is it?"
The rat took two steps along the wall, stopped, and looked back. Frank had no idea what bargain it believed they'd made. It had rescued his missing washer, which was more useful than most of the recommendations he'd received from outside consultants, and it hadn't asked him to sign anything.
Frank looked back once, expecting the rat to vanish into a branch passage. It waited with its bad leg tucked oddly beneath it. He'd missed that failing bracket on more shifts than he cared to count; the animal had reached it by going where Frank couldn't fit. He had no intention of adopting every creature that made itself useful, but this one had followed him despite having every chance to leave.
"You can come as far as the stairs," he said, without stopping to make sure the rat agreed. "After that you're making your own decisions."
It followed him up three flights. At the second landing the creature paused to favor its hind leg, and Frank waited without calling attention to it. By the time he reached his room, he'd given up negotiating how far a rat could follow a skeleton.
He placed a clean rag beside the chair, moved his loose screws off the floor, and put the string where the little thing could reach it. The rat inspected the rag and immediately settled underneath the chair instead. Frank accepted the verdict and turned on the viewing glass.
A party was quarrelling in front of a cracked statue. Something blue seeped from the stone's jaw, and the two fighters were trying to settle whether it was poison by daring each other to touch it. Frank recognized the statue as one he had repaired last winter after a different party tried to pry away its teeth. The blue fluid was alchemical coolant from a cracked line, but touching it could still blister skin if the mixture hadn't been properly diluted.
"Wouldn't do that," he told the screen as one man pulled off his glove. The rat climbed onto the stool, nearly knocked itself sideways with the bad leg, and found its balance again without Frank touching it. It watched the figures moving across the glass.
The man in the screen touched the statue. His companions began shouting.
Frank settled back in his chair. The rat squeaked once, sounding more interested than distressed.
"Yeah," Frank said. "You wouldn't believe how often they do it twice."