The first plank returned with a noise like a cupboard closing.
Everyone on the bank stopped working.
It appeared across the bridge’s empty section, wet, scarred, and real.
Two nail heads caught the afternoon light.
A second plank started forming beside it, then faded away.
Joss kept his hand on the frame strap.
“Nobody crosses yet.”
Emmett already had a foot on the approach.
He took it off.
Below the bridge, Tan and three dock workers held the receiver half against its bank socket.
Nera had aligned the cradle with the old anchor bolts.
Joss’s Brace now followed a sound path into stone, but only one of the two receiver sections was seated.
The brass needle stood at sixty-six.
They had paid for two planks with four hours of work.
A useful exchange, if the planks stayed there.
Tan tightened the last temporary wire around the socket.
“Foot is square.
Don’t change the angle.”
Joss gave Nera room to turn the recessed catch.
The line drawing on the frame showed one support amber, one red.
“We can let a person cross,” she said.
“Single file.
Nothing on wheels.”
Sella volunteered to be first.
She wrapped both hands around the repaired rail and walked slowly over the new planks.
When she reached the other bank, she held up Joss’s lunch tin.
“Still dented.”
People laughed too loudly.
Joss understood why.
They needed a noise other than boards failing.
He let twelve people cross, counting gaps between them.
At the thirteenth, the frame’s amber mark flickered.
“Wait,” he called.
They waited.
It steadied again.
The recipient support could take people one at a time.
It couldn’t carry the district’s morning traffic, or stand through the next high tide without the counterweight shoe.
He looked at Nera.
She had already seen the same change.
“Give them the crossing,” she said quietly.
“We’ll fix the footing.”
“How long have we got?”
“Several hours, with careful use.”
“Tell them.”
Nera’s jaw shifted.
“Panic puts everyone on the same plank.”
“So does telling them it’s safe.”
She glanced at the waiting line.
The people near the back had begun bringing sacks.
A father had lifted his little daughter onto his shoulders to show her the restored crossing.
Joss stepped onto a low bollard.
“This is temporary,” he said.
The laughter stopped.
He showed them the two support marks instead of asking them to trust his face.
“One receiver’s still missing.
The counterweight beneath the bridge isn’t seated.
One person at a time until we recover it.
No carts.
High water may take these planks if we haven’t finished.”
An older woman lifted her basket.
“Then why bring them back?”
“So the people who need to cross now can cross.
And so we have somewhere to work from.”
Emmett asked, “Who pays for all this?”
Joss was grateful enough to answer him immediately.
“The district, if it wants a bridge.
I’m out of savings.
Tan’s carrying eighteen marks of labor.
Dema’s lost a plank and lent us a trolley.
I need workers, dry rope, food, and somebody recording it.”
“You want paid while we stand here waiting?”
“I want to keep doing it tomorrow.”
A woman carrying a soup bucket pushed through the gathering.
“Put names beside the promises,” she said.
“People remember charity differently after they’ve eaten.”
Edda set the bucket beside Nera’s chair.
Her son, a thin boy with a missing front tooth, carried an empty crate that held bowls rather than bridges.
“Pip.
Bowl line on the dry side.
Ask before giving seconds.”
He set to work without an argument.
Halfway through arranging the bowls, he picked a loose nail out of the bench and handed it to Tan.
“This one sticks up.”
She gave him a small wooden box.
“Any more you find go in here.
Don’t climb anything to look.”
Edda took a slate from the cookhouse stores.
She wrote down Tan’s credit, the broken plank, and the repair work Dema expected in return for the trolley.
Then she began recording offers.
Two laborers for the evening.
A coil of rope.
Six meals at half a mark each, payable when the route earned money.
Four households pledged a total of twenty-four marks toward completing the crossing, due after it passed a proper load test.
Edda drew an empty square beside the pledge: AFTER LOAD TEST.
Edda asked for a separate column on the slate.
“Water,” she said.
“The upper tap keeper says every crossing complaint goes to the same office as his supply permit.
We have the river, but boiling it costs fuel.”
Joss knew the tap.
He had delivered replacement fittings to it two weeks earlier, and nobody had mentioned the office then.
“How much stored?”
“Three cookhouse barrels.
More scattered in houses.
I haven’t counted those.”
“Count them.
Keep the bridge slate where people can see it.”
“You think the office will cut us off?”
“I think I was paid to deliver a bridge to a dead woman.
I’d like the next bad idea to arrive after we’ve checked the cupboards.”
Edda put Pip in charge of asking each household what it could spare.
He took a second slate and a piece of chalk, proud of a job that required knocking instead of climbing.
Nera watched him go, then marked the tap keeper’s office on her route chart.
She left the chart open beside the needle.
The plan gave them enough hands to move the receiver half’s spare braces into position.
Nera marked the dry sockets; Tan checked every pin.
Joss handed out jobs that didn’t require his charter.
It was harder than hauling.
People asked sensible questions at inconvenient moments.
One man tied knots differently from him.
Another wanted to brace a rail where Nera needed room to turn the catch.
Joss began fixing their work himself, then stopped when Tan pointed at his bloody dressing.
He showed the knot once and made the man tie it again.
By dusk, the crossing could take a line of empty-handed workers.
The frame stayed at sixty-four.
Joss sat long enough to eat soup without standing on a wheel.
Nera lowered herself onto the bench beside him.
“I should have told them,” she said.
“You told me.”
“You weren’t the only person at risk.”
He handed her the bread heel from his bowl.
She took it as if accepting the point required something useful to do with her hand.
Pip returned from the lower steps carrying a mud-coated iron tool.
“Didn’t climb,” he told Tan.
“It washed up.”
It was a survey hook, the sort used to mark a support’s depth.
Its shaft had broken.
Three shallow cuts crossed the handle above a little notch pointing west.
Joss stopped chewing.
His sister had cut that mark into every tool she owned.
Three lines for the people who shared them; the notch so she could tell where she’d set the thing down.
Bess had been twenty feet ahead of him when the Blue Scar road broke.
For two years, he had imagined that distance whenever he couldn’t sleep.
“Where?” he asked.
Pip pointed beneath the flooded span.
Tan watched Joss’s face instead of the tool.
“Old mark?”
“Hers.”
“That doesn’t date the tool.”
“I know.”
He didn’t know why saying it hurt so much.
He washed the hook in the bucket, keeping the handle clear of his bandage.
Beneath the mud lay a fresh scrape across one of Bess’s old cuts.
Someone had used the tool recently.
That could mean a salvager.
It could mean nothing he wanted.
Joss set it beside the counterweight drawing.
“We’re going below at low tide,” he said.
Nera studied both objects, then moved the lantern nearer.
“Then let’s make sure you come back with more than a mark.”