Joss put the filed pin beside Tovin’s purse.
“What happens when the bridge opens?”
Tovin examined the pin without touching it.
His two men stayed a few steps downhill, watching the support crew rather than Joss.
“People cross.
Inspectors assess the work.”
“And the receiver you took?”
“Held pending inspection.”
“Inspection needs the receiver.”
Tovin’s mouth tightened.
He had expected fear or gratitude, perhaps an argument about the money.
Joss gave him a damaged object and a task that still wasn’t finished.
“You could leave this to qualified carriers.”
“Name one who’s coming.”
Below them, Edda called for two workers to carry hot water to Tan.
Sella was packing medicine into a basket for the morning crossing.
Emmett had moved his flour out of the cracked oven room; he was kneading dough on a borrowed cookhouse bench.
Tovin followed Joss’s gaze.
“Twenty marks isn’t available tomorrow.”
Joss picked up the pin.
“Neither is this footing if you keep the other half.”
He walked down the stairs before he could start calculating how far twenty marks would carry him west.
The calculation followed him anyway.
A gate pass.
A sound cart.
Food.
The possibility of asking about a surveyor’s mark somewhere other than the city that had already told him she was dead.
At the cookhouse door, he stopped until his hands were steady.
Tan sat near the stove in borrowed trousers, her wet clothes drying above it.
Latch had taken the warmer side of the hearth and opened its lid toward the heat.
Edda moved it farther away with a board, and it accepted the new place after a short tap on the floor.
“You’re staying,” Tan said.
“You sound annoyed.”
“I wrote an invoice.
I’d like the debtor alive to dispute it.”
He set the pin and docket on the table.
Nera read the docket while Edda served the last of their six credited bowls.
“New meals get a new line,” Edda said.
“I still have to buy grain.”
“Tan first from the completion pledge,” Joss said.
“Food next.
My wage waits.”
“And Dema’s trolley?” Tan asked.
“We repair it.”
Edda pointed her spoon at him.
“Give me names for that we.”
She sat down.
It was the first time Joss had seen her without a bucket or slate in her hands.
“What do you need from us?
Specific things.”
He spread Nera’s receiver drawing.
The conversation became easier when there was a place to point.
Two night watchers beside the frame.
Someone sober at the crossing.
Six workers to clear the old receiver bed before the next installation.
Nera needed her chair moved where she could reach the catch without reopening her knee.
Tan needed dry space to repair Latch’s hinge and inspect their damaged cart.
Joss needed a permit that would let them bring the second receiver through the guarded yard.
“Krail keeps them at dispatch,” he said.
“Along with the original removal order.”
“He’ll burn it,” Emmett said from the doorway.
“He needs it to get paid for the handover.
If he burns it before the holding office signs, he’s sold a bridge without a receipt.”
Nera tapped the docket’s serial number.
“The full order will list who authorized the receiver release.
This is only the freight copy.”
Joss knew the dispatch house’s lower yard.
He had carried urgent messages through it on flood nights, when the street gate was closed.
A drain corridor connected the river gate to the records cellar.
Its steps were shallow enough for a courier and too narrow for a patrol cart.
“I can get in.”
Tan put down her bowl.
“I can get you out.”
“You were in river water an hour ago.”
“Then we’ll leave after I’ve warmed up.
We’ll also check the drain’s gate before going beneath it.”
Nera didn’t volunteer for the journey.
She took the receiver chart closer and marked which ground braces could hold while Joss was away.
The bridge frame would remain bound to him.
Its physical burden would rest on the bank socket, with two watchers reading its needle.
If it shifted, they would stop the crossing and use the emergency blocks.
Nera could correct the anchor’s position, but she couldn’t replace him indefinitely.
“Two hours,” she said.
“Come back before high water.”
They agreed on bells instead of trusting frightened people’s sense of time.
Emmett offered his nephew for the frame watch.
Edda promised a cookhouse runner.
Sella took the crossing line.
Nobody asked Joss to stand in all three places.
The quiet that followed made him notice how tired everyone was.
Edda had a red mark across her forehead where she’d pushed damp hair away with a hot wrist.
Emmett’s hands were cracked from washing flour off them too often.
Nera kept shifting the edge of her blanket so nobody could see blood seeping beneath it.
“Two hours is the trip,” Joss said.
“After that, the first watchers sleep.
Swap them.
No one works both shifts because they think I want it.”
Emmett’s nephew asked whether the men who had tried the wire might come back.
“Yes,” Joss said.
The boy looked down at his cap.
He was older than Pip by several years.
He kept turning the cap in his hands.
“I’m not good in a fight.”
“You’re watching a needle.
When it moves, ring the bell.
If someone comes with a knife, step back and ring harder.
We’ll put the heavy tools where the adults can reach them.”
Edda moved her chair beside the boy.
“I’ll take the first shift with him.”
Edda named a neighbor to cover the stove and sent Pip with the request.
Then she pulled her chair beside the watch bell.
He asked Dema for his original cart’s broken axle plate.
She sent it from the damaged cart in her passage, with the surviving borrowed plank and a terse reminder about the other one.
Tan fashioned a narrow wheeled prop from the plate and a spare yard cart.
They would need it if the drain gate was lowered before they escaped.
Joss remembered the postponed onion trader.
“Tomorrow’s market run.”
“Bren can arrange another courier,” Tan said.
“You owe their two marks.
Same run, paid properly.”
He nodded.
She wrote the two marks on the invoice before he could forget them.
Outside, footsteps ran toward the bridge.
One of the new watchers, Emmett’s nephew, came through the cookhouse door with his cap in his hand.
“Men at the lower footing,” he said.
“They tried to pull the wire.
We shouted.
They left toward the dispatch lane.”
Nera stood too quickly and caught herself against the table.
Joss made her sit again.
“Watchers stay doubled.
Move the lamp onto the socket so they can’t work in its shadow.”
Tan wrapped her dry coat around her shoulders.
Her face had lost its river chill.
Tovin’s purse had bought him no time at all.
Joss secured the filed pin inside his shirt beside the docket.
They would make the proof harder to dismiss by finding the page that explained who wanted this crossing empty.
“Two hours,” he told Nera.
She held up the route chart.
“Use the high stair on your way back.
Someone who knows you use the drain will know it too.”