“Right,” Tomas said, bracing his boot against a rib the size of a lamppost.
“So which one of us is asking the whale for directions today?”
Lin snorted.
“You go first.
Tell it we’re sorry about the whole being-dead thing.”
“I’m not apologising to a corpse.
That’s bad luck.”
“You’re standing inside it with a hacksaw.
I think the luck’s already spoken.”
The throat cavity held the cold like a held breath — old marrow fat and struck flint, a smell none of them named out loud because naming it meant admitting what they were standing in.
Desmond let the banter wash past him and put his hand flat on the nearest span of raw Marrow.
The node pulsed once, warm against his sternum, and the certainty came up through his palm like he was reading grain in wood.
Rich.
Dense.
The kind that would fetch twice the price of the grey stuff Marce had been bagging yesterday.
He pulled his hand back and marked the spot with a piece of chalk, casual, like he’d done it a thousand times before.
“Boss?” Bram called from the far wall.
“This one?”
Desmond turned.
The boy had his glove on a chunk that looked clean — smooth, faintly luminous, the kind buyers paid for.
Desmond took two steps closer and felt the node go tight and cold.
Rot.
Or worse than rot.
Something wrong coiled up inside it like a bad weld under paint.
“Leave that one,” he said.
Bram frowned.
“It’s good metal, innit?
Looks—”
“Leave it.”
The boy’s hand came off the chunk like he’d been burned, and Desmond walked over, crouched, and pressed his palm flat to the surface.
The wrongness spiked — a pocket of something that wanted to move, to vent, and the certainty that followed was colder than anything he’d felt yet.
Don’t touch.
Don’t cut.
Don’t stay near it when the tide comes in.
He pulled his hand back and straightened.
“It’s a gas pocket.
Cut into that and it’ll flood the whole cavity before you can get your mask on.
Mark it and we work around it.”
Marce looked up from the section he was scoring.
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“How d’you know?”
Desmond shrugged and turned back to the rib he’d marked.
“Twenty years of eyeballing scrap.
You get a feel for what’s lying.”
It wasn’t a lie.
Not exactly.
He had twenty years.
He did have a feel for it.
The fact that the feel had changed in the last two days was just something he wasn’t going to explain.
Marce grunted and went back to work, and Tomas started humming something tuneless, and the tide clock kept ticking down in Desmond’s head.
Ninety minutes when they’d climbed in.
Seventy now.
He moved through the cavity and touched every span he could reach without making it obvious he was checking.
The node pulsed and the certainty came, clean and cold, and he started sorting the haul in his head before his hands ever moved.
Rich.
Decent.
Scrap.
Rot.
Rich.
Scrap.
Rich.
Contact was certain.
Arm’s length was a rough guess, a maybe that slid into probably when he squinted at the color.
Across the cavity was nothing — just dead metal and his own lying eyes.
So.
A tool with a range.
A gift with a leash.
He could work with that.
“Boss, you want this whole section or just the prime cuts?” Kofi asked, gesturing at a wall of Marrow that ran floor to ceiling, most of it grey and pitted.
Desmond walked over and ran his hand along the seam.
The node hummed.
Rich at the base, where the old blood had pooled.
Scrap everywhere else.
“Bottom third,” he said.
“Rest of it’s not worth the weight.”
Kofi nodded and started marking, and Desmond moved on, and the cavity filled with the sound of hacksaws and hammers and men joking because the work was grim and the clock was ticking and nobody wanted to be the first one to say they were scared.
“Swear to God,” Tomas said, hauling a length of dense Marrow toward the sled, “if this thing wakes up and asks for its ribs back, I’m gone.
You lot can negotiate.”
“It’s dead,” Lin said.
“So’s my uncle Frank, but he still votes.”
Desmond cracked a smile he didn’t feel and kept working.
His hand found another span.
Rich.
His hand found another.
Rot, shallow, safe to leave.
His hand found the next, and the node pulsed warm and certain, and he marked it with chalk and moved on.
The crew credited him for the good haul later.
For his eye.
For his luck.
He didn’t correct them.
Sixty minutes left, and Bram was working near the gas pocket again, not touching it but close, and Desmond kept half his attention on the boy because the certainty that had flagged the rot hadn’t gone away.
It sat in his chest like a second heartbeat, slow and patient and wrong.
Fifty minutes.
Tomas started another joke.
Lin told him to shut it.
Marce called for the sled, and Kofi hauled it over, and the bags filled with the rich cuts Desmond had marked and the scrap they’d ignored, and nobody asked why the success rate had suddenly doubled.
Forty minutes, and the gas pocket vented.
Not catastrophic.
Not the flood Desmond had felt waiting inside it.
Just a thin hiss of something cold and sharp that made Bram stumble back, coughing, and sent Marce shouting for masks.
Desmond grabbed Bram’s shoulder and hauled him toward the mouth of the cavity, and the boy gasped and blinked and sucked air through his sleeve, and by the time they hit clean atmosphere the hiss had stopped and the pocket had gone inert.
“Christ,” Bram said.
“I wasn’t even touching it.”
“Pressure shift from the tide,” Marce said, coming up behind them with his mask half-on.
“Happens.
You all right?”
“Yeah.
Yeah, I’m—” Bram looked at Desmond.
“You knew.”
“I guessed.”
“You guessed exactly where the gas was and exactly when it’d blow?”
“I guessed it was bad and we shouldn’t touch it.
The rest was luck.”
Bram didn’t look like he believed him, but he didn’t push, and Marce clapped the boy on the shoulder and told him to sit down and breathe, and Tomas made a joke about whale breath, and the moment passed.
Thirty minutes left, and the sled was loaded, and they hauled it out of the throat cavity and up onto the tilted deck where the sun was still shining and the air didn’t taste like cold fat.
Desmond stood at the mouth and looked back into the cavity — at the chalk marks on the spans they’d stripped, at the gas pocket sitting quiet and spent against the far wall, at the rib Bram had almost grabbed.
The node pulsed once.
Warm.
Satisfied, maybe.
Or just acknowledging the work.
He turned his back on it and followed the crew toward the ladder, and nobody said anything about the haul being twice what they’d expected, and nobody asked how he’d known, and the lie he’d told — twenty years of eyeballing scrap — sat in his chest beside the node and felt like the start of something he wouldn’t be able to take back.
The tide came in an hour later and filled the cavity to the ceiling, and by then they were gone.
Marce tallied the haul at the shed and whistled low.
“That’s good weight, boss.
Real good.
We keep pulling days like this, we’ll finish the four runs with margin.”
“Right,” Desmond said.
“Bram says you spotted a gas pocket before it blew.
That true?”
“It vented after we’d moved off.
Could’ve been worse.”
“Could’ve been us.” Marce looked at him a beat too long, weighing whether to ask the question he’d already half-answered for himself.
“You’ve got good instincts.
Always have.
But today felt—”
“Felt what?”
Marce shrugged.
“Lucky.”
Desmond said nothing.
“We’ll take lucky,” Marce said, and turned back to the clipboard.
Desmond walked outside and stood in the late light with the node pulsing warm against his sternum, and he thought about the way Bram had looked at him — like a man who’d just watched something impossible and was trying to square it with the shape of the world he knew.
The sense worked.
It was reliable.
It was more than he’d hoped for.
And he could never tell a single person how he knew what he knew, because the knowing was the thing that would make them stop trusting the rest of him.
He’d saved a man’s life with a power he had to disown in the same breath.
The price of the gift, he was starting to understand, was that he’d have to lie to everyone he kept alive with it.
He looked back toward the shed, where the crew was laughing over the haul and Tomas was doing a terrible impression of a venting gas pocket, and he felt the wall going up — not brick, not visible, just the space that opens when you know something no one else can see.
The node pulsed once, calm and certain, like it had already made peace with what he was only beginning to understand.
He walked in, poured himself what was left of the tea, and let Tomas’s terrible gas-pocket impression carry him the rest of the way back into the room.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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