Cinder stayed in the doorway until Mara nearly stepped on her.
Mara came down from the office with a ledger under one arm and a mug in the other, stopped with her boot half a pace from Cinder’s forepaws, and changed direction without comment. Cinder watched her pass, then looked through the open shutters toward the river-ward street.
Tarin had left the patch beside his chair clear.
He finished lifting the shutters and did not call her over.
Morning damp had crept under the warehouse doors. It silvered the lower boards and darkened the old blanket folded beneath the warm side of the sorting table. The blanket had been there long enough to collect solvent dust along one edge and enough of Cinder’s hair to make Mara threaten to burn it whenever she was in a mood to exaggerate.
Tarin crouched beside it. “This needs washing.”
“So wash it,” Mara said from the receiving desk.
“She’s using it.”
Cinder was still at the doorway.
Mara opened the ledger. “Then this is an excellent time.”
He brought over a shallow wash pan, a stiff brush, and a stack of clean folded cloth from the worker shelf. The top piece smelled of soap instead of the yard. Cinder glanced back when the pan scraped stone, but she did not move.
Tarin pulled the old blanket free.
Cinder’s head came around at once.
He stopped with half the fabric bunched in his hands.
She crossed the floor, not toward him but toward the blanket. Her nose pressed into the fold nearest the table leg. Then she put one forepaw on it.
“You picked your moment,” Tarin said.
Cinder lowered her weight.
He had planned to strip the bedding, scrub the stone, dry it, and put the clean cloth down before receiving opened properly. The clean stack was already at his knee. He could have moved her. She was close enough to touch, and nothing in the room suggested panic.
His hand went toward her shoulder.
Cinder’s ears flattened. Her body shifted backward before his fingers reached her.
Tarin took his hand away.
She held still for another breath, then settled onto the portion of blanket he had not lifted.
Mara turned a page at the desk. “Other half of the floor still dirty?”
“Yes.”
“Remarkable.”
Tarin let the bunched section fall. He moved the pan to the other side of the table and began there.
The yard opened around him in pieces. A carrier brought two sacks of cracked housings before first bell. One of the wash workers found a contamination tag stuck to the wrong bin and made enough noise about it that Mara came off the desk. Tarin scrubbed a dark line of river mud from the stone, shifted the clean cloth out of splash range, and worked around Cinder’s occupied patch instead of finishing the whole rectangle.
Cinder eventually got up when a seller arrived dragging a handcart with a loose wheel. The wheel clicked every half turn against its pin. She moved behind Mara before the cart reached the receiving line.
The seller leaned over his load. “That yours?”
Mara did not look at Cinder. “That is not part of your sale.”
The man took the answer he was given.
Tarin had the old blanket free now. He carried it toward the wash sink, then saw Cinder watching from behind Mara’s legs. The seller’s wheel clicked again.
Her ears went flat.
Tarin looked at the wheel, then at the small brass clips he had set beside the clean bedding. He had meant to clip the fresh layers together so they would stop walking across the stone whenever Cinder turned in her sleep. The clips made nearly the same sharp little sound when closed.
He picked one up.
The thought came cleanly: one click here, away from the cart, and he would know whether the sound itself bothered her or whether the stranger and the wheel were doing the work.
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His thumb rested on the spring.
Then he put the clip back down.
The seller was arguing with Mara over the weight of wet stock. Cinder was pressed close to Mara’s legs. The clean bedding could survive without becoming a question.
Tarin carried the clips back to the tool drawer.
By midday the old blanket hung over a rail with only its dirtiest end washed. Cinder had refused the fresh cloth twice without doing anything dramatic enough to make refusal look impressive. The first time, Tarin spread a folded piece beneath the table and she walked around it to lie on bare warm stone. The second time, he shifted it closer to the place she usually chose, and she left the table entirely.
A third adjustment would only turn observation into pressure, so he left it alone.
That restraint was harder than it should have been.
At the South Test Court, an odd result demanded repetition. A failed setup was supposed to be changed and run again. Selka could stop a lane, alter one condition, and ask whether the result held. Tarin had spent four days learning to distrust a single clean proof.
Here, repeating the condition meant bothering Cinder until her answer became useful to him.
He hated how quickly the difference could vanish when he wanted certainty.
He carried the fresh stack to the wash shelf and separated the pieces he had already handled with solvent-damp gloves. One smelled sharply of soap. Another had come straight from the dry cupboard and carried almost nothing at all. He caught himself arranging them from least familiar to most familiar, building a little ladder of possible answers.
Mara appeared beside him with an armful of receiving slips. “What are you doing?”
“Keeping the clean cloth clean.”
She looked at the three separate piles.
Tarin put two of them back together.
“Mm.” Mara dropped the slips on the desk. “If the goal is bedding, bedding can wait until tomorrow.”
“The floor’s half scrubbed.”
“The floor has survived being dirty before.”
“You complain about it every week.”
“I complain about you every week too. Neither is an emergency.”
Cinder had come no closer. She lay where the heat from the worktable reached the stone, watching a strip of sunlight creep across the receiving floor.
Tarin could have used the rest of the afternoon to make the space objectively better: scrub the second half, dry both blankets, clear the cages before anyone needed them. Doing all of that at once would also remove the old smell, move the familiar fabric, change the approach, and leave him standing over the result waiting for Cinder to approve it.
He hated the picture because he recognized the posture. Bench cleared. Conditions prepared. Result expected.
So he folded one clean piece once and left it on the worker shelf instead of putting it under the table. The other clean cloth stayed where Cinder had already seen it. The old blanket kept its dry end.
Mara collected the slips again. “There. You have successfully failed to finish something.”
“I’m learning from the yard.”
“Don’t make that my fault.”
Mara set a bowl of chopped scraps near the office stair during the short lunch break. Cinder left the bare warm stone and went to it immediately.
“She’ll take food from you,” Tarin said.
“Food is better than your bedding project.”
“That isn’t a fair comparison.”
“Neither is asking a working yard to care whether your blanket has achieved methodological dignity.”
Tarin studied the half-cleaned floor.
Mara tore a piece of bread and pointed it at him. “You have receiving tags to copy.”
He did.
The task took him away from the table for most of the next hour. When he returned, Cinder had dragged the clean cloth from where he had left it.
Not into the bedding space.
She had pulled it halfway beneath Mara’s old work coat, which hung from a low peg near the office stair. One corner of the coat lay on the floor. Cinder had turned twice on the layered cloth and settled with her muzzle on the worn cuff.
Tarin stopped beside the sorting lane.
Mara followed his gaze. “If you tell me that’s data, I charge you rent for the coat.”
“I wasn’t going to say data.”
“Your face remains unemployed as a liar.”
He almost laughed. Selka had said something too similar two nights ago, and for a moment the Court tried to follow him into the yard again: conditions, variables, repeatability, the satisfaction of a pattern becoming cleaner.
Cinder’s eyes opened.
Tarin turned away first and copied the receiving tags.
The afternoon made the bedding problem worse in ordinary ways. A wash worker needed the rail, so Tarin had to take the damp blanket down early. A spill at receiving sent him for fresh grit. Someone stacked two empty sorting cages beside the warm table, narrowing the approach from the rear.
Cinder came halfway toward the table, saw the cages, and stopped.
Tarin was carrying one end of a salvage crate with another worker. He could not move the cages without putting the crate down in the traffic lane.
“Give me a minute,” he said.
Cinder backed away.
The other worker nodded toward her. “Want me to shut the front?”
“No. Keep the lane clear.”
They finished moving the crate. By the time Tarin came back, Cinder had gone under the office stair with Mara’s coat cuff still visible beside one forepaw.
The easiest thing would have been to clear the cages immediately and coax her out. Instead Tarin moved them because they were in the wrong place for tomorrow’s sorting, then left the route open and went back to the wash pan.
An hour passed before Cinder used it.
She emerged when the yard had quieted and crossed the newly open space without looking at Tarin. The route took her back to the warm side of the table. Tarin was at the sink wringing brown water from the old blanket, far enough away that she did not have to pass his hands to get there.
He left the clean folded cloth where it was. Cinder stepped onto one corner, then off again, choosing the bare warm stone instead.
Tarin kept working.
By closing time, the bedding space looked worse than it had that morning. Half the stone was clean and half was not. The old blanket had one washed end, one dry end, and a tide mark between them. The fresh cloth lay crooked near the table. Tarin had removed the brass clips entirely and replaced them with nothing.
Mara stood over the result with her keys in hand.
“Impressive,” she said.
“It isn’t finished.”
“I had gathered that from the unfinished parts.”
Tarin lifted the wash pan. Cinder moved into the space he had just vacated, nosed the old blanket once, then ignored it. She turned toward the office stair instead.
Mara had already taken down her coat.
Cinder paused.
Tarin set the pan by the sink and left the fresh cloth where it was.
After a moment Cinder crossed to the warm side of the table, circled on the bare clean patch, and lay down with her back against the table leg. The untouched half of the floor remained dark beside her.
Mara locked the condemned-room door. Tarin rinsed the brush and hung it above the sink.
The old blanket was still damp when they put out the front lamps.