The service gallery smelled drier than the rest of the Riverworks, which was not the same thing as dry. Old mineral bloom roughened the brick at shoulder height. Rust had grown in the seams around the maintenance doors. A shallow gutter carried a skin of black water along the wall toward deeper channels Tarin had no intention of visiting today.
The municipal work tag in his pocket was almost insultingly ordinary: confirm the painted bypass marks on Gallery Five, recover two condemned relay housings from a wall rack, and leave the access lane clear for the wash crew due tomorrow. After the wet folio, the Inkmaw, and a workshop bench that could now hold eight Charge in a card-shaped bottle, Tarin found the ordinariness comforting.
He had brought rope anyway. Mara had made sure of that.
“Cards aren’t a substitute for having hands,” she’d said while adding two wooden wedges and a flat pry bar to his kit. Tarin had pointed out that his class was, in several important respects, built around cards being substitutes for having better hands. Mara had given him the pry bar.
Now it rode against his hip while LATCH-0 and THREAD-0 sat ready in their sleeves. SIPHON-0 stayed padded and unbound beneath them, reservoir full from the previous day’s bench work. The bandage around his forearm pulled when he tightened his grip on the lantern pole, more annoying than painful.
The first two bypass marks were where the municipal sketch said they would be. The third had faded to a chalky crescent under a leak stain, but enough red pigment remained to confirm the turn. Tarin scraped loose grit from the brick with the back of his glove, copied the mark onto the work sheet, and moved on.
The relay housings were mounted beyond a waist-high pipe run, each a dull metal shell about the length of his forearm. Municipal tags hung from their bolts on wire loops. Nothing about them was valuable except that Quill had agreed to remove them and somebody would ask where they were if the answer was not on tomorrow’s manifest.
The lower housing came free with the pry bar and bad language.
The upper one did not.
Its lower bracket had twisted inward, pinching the shell against the wall rack. Tarin set the lantern down and flexed his bandaged arm once. He could have fought the bracket with the bar. He could also do what LATCH-0 had been made to do.
Habit won before the thought had fully finished. He bound LATCH-0.
The card’s familiar amber line lit beneath his thumb. He set the clause against the bracket, took the load, and felt the pull settle into the authored geometry—then hitch. Not fail. Hitch.
The card demanded one more point of Charge than it should have. Tarin frowned. A pale film had appeared across the card face. He rubbed at it with his thumb. Powder came away on the leather of his glove, so fine it looked almost white in the lantern light.
Above him, something moved. He looked up. The brick ceiling was furred with moths.
They had been there the entire time. Hundreds of small ash-pale bodies clung around an old conduit trunk where a faint registry lamp still glimmered behind cracked glass. Alone, none of them looked more dangerous than pantry pests. The first few that lifted into the air were almost delicate.
Then THREAD-0 came into Tarin’s hand because the bracket shifted under LATCH-0’s uneven pull and his body reached for the second half of a solution it knew well. He bound it. It took the same extra point of Charge. The Thread glow came up muffled, as if somebody had breathed over hot glass.
The ceiling came down.
Moths poured off the brick in a soft collapsing sheet.
Tarin released the bracket and stepped back. The first wave did not strike him. It struck the light around his cards. Pale wings whirled over his hands. Dust thickened on LATCH-0’s border. The active line shivered. THREAD-0’s standing tension weakened enough that the loose bracket sagged another finger-width.
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Tarin had no interest in finding out how many more activations the cloud could tax before the route became a real problem. He broke both bindings. The authored glow vanished, and the moths overshot him.
For three heartbeats they filled the gallery from wall to wall, a dry whisper against brick, coat, lantern hood, and the metal rack. Tarin crouched with one forearm over his face. Dust gritted between his teeth.
Then the cloud lost its shape. Not all at once. The nearest moths circled the dark cards as if waiting for them to become food again. Others drifted toward the cracked registry lamp. The thickest current pulled back along the ceiling toward the old conduit trunk.
Tarin stayed still until he could see the far wall through them. His first thought was that SIPHON-0 held eight Charge. His second was that spending any of it would require making something active. He left the Siphon in its sleeve.
“Fine,” he muttered through the cloth over his mouth. “Hands.”
The upper relay housing still had to come off the wall. He wrapped LATCH-0 and THREAD-0 in their sleeves, tucked both deep in the satchel, and closed the flap. The few moths still wandering near him ignored it. When he lifted the satchel and carried it three paces away from the rack, they did not follow.
That was enough information for the moment. He was not going to light them again while pale dust still drifted around the conduit. Tarin opened the mundane side of his kit.
The pry bar fit under the twisted bracket but wanted to slip. He drove one of Mara’s wooden wedges behind the housing with the heel of his palm. The first strike sent a sting through the cut under his bandage. He changed hands, braced his shoulder against the rack, and worked the wedge deeper in short pushes instead.
Metal complained against brick. A few moths stirred overhead when the lantern swung, but the light itself did not draw them. The cracked registry lamp did. The old thing hummed at a level Tarin could barely hear now that he was listening for it.
Why it was still powered could wait. What mattered now was that the moths preferred it while his cards stayed dark.
He looped rope through the relay housing’s carry eye and tied the other end around the lower pipe support. Not to lift it. Just to keep fifty pounds of awkward metal from dropping into the gutter when the bracket finally let go.
The bracket bent another fraction. His forearm began to throb under the bandage. Tarin stopped, changed angle, and put the pry bar lower.
There was a kind of humiliation in doing slowly what LATCH-0 would normally have made clean. No elegant load. No Thread line holding the housing exactly where he wanted it. No authored correction when the metal tried to twist.
Just leverage, bad footing, rope burn through gloves, and the old rule that anything heavy became heavier when it knew you were tired. The bracket tore loose. The housing dropped six inches and hit the rope. Tarin grunted as the support line snapped taut. The knot held. The pipe support held. The housing swung once, struck the wall, and settled above the gutter instead of in it.
He laughed despite himself. “That’s one way.” The moths did not care. He lowered the housing by hand.
The access lane still had to be cleared. The lower housing fit under one arm; the upper kept snagging on its bent flange. Tarin looked once at the closed satchel, where a pale moth calmly cleaned an antenna, then chose the flat hammer. He beat the flange inward, roped both shells into an ugly drag sling, and hauled them out with every authored card dark.
By the second painted bypass turn the cloud had fallen away. Tarin stopped long enough to write the useful part on the work sheet: moth cloud active around powered equipment; keep authored tools dark through Gallery Five until wash and inspection. He left the powder for the crew instead of turning a completed job into another experiment.
The final stair killed the drag sling. Tarin carried one housing in each hand, the heavier shell tugging at his bandaged arm while three authored cards contributed nothing from his back. At the top landing he set the load down until his grip stopped trembling, then picked it up again.
The door above opened onto daylight filtered gray through the Riverworks yard grating. Tarin lifted the housings. By the time he reached the Quill cart, the cards in his satchel were still dark.
He set the two municipal tags face-up on the cart bed, checked them against the work sheet, and tied the housings down with the same rope that had kept one of them out of the gutter.
Only then did he open the satchel. Pale dust marked the outer sleeves of LATCH-0 and THREAD-0. The cards themselves were intact beneath it, their authored lines quiet. SIPHON-0’s reservoir mark still showed full under its padded edge, eight stored Charge that had been no help at all inside the gallery. Tarin closed the flap again instead of binding anything.
The pry bar lay across the cart beside the two wedges. One wedge had split down the grain. The other was crushed flat on one corner. He kept both. Mara would want to see what the job had done to the tools.
Tarin took the cart handle with his uninjured hand and started back toward Quill, the dark weight of the satchel between his shoulders and the relay housings rattling behind him over every joint in the paving.