She holds out her hand. I take it. Her fingers close around mine and the warmth is there, the same pull, and my venom is already clearing in response to her touch.
First I put water and the morning’s flatbread in her hands, and I watch until both are gone. What is left of her has to be enough for what is below.
I uncoil from the steps. We go into the lower levels.
BRYN
In the west corridor, three inches of channel are already cleared. Recent. The chips on the floor, not yet kicked aside. My flat stone beside the groove, positioned where I would pick it up.
I don’t mention it. I pick up the stone and keep walking.
We start at the first junction below the main hall.
The main channel is calcified, narrowed to half its width. But six inches below it, I feel the edge of a bypass groove. An overflow route the original builders carved. Never used. Never calcified.
“Here,” I say. I mark the bypass entry and the point where the main channel needs to be sealed. “We close the main branch at this junction and open the bypass.”
He strikes. The seal point chips and crumbles. He packs the gap with stone dust and presses until the main channel is blocked. I move to the bypass entry. He widens it with three precise strikes. Clean stone, ready to carry flow.
We move down the corridor. Junction by junction. I read the walls against my drawing. Each junction needs my fingers first, finding the bypass entry, then the charcoal mark, then the chisel. Seal the damaged branch. Open the clean one. Reroute.
By the third section the rhythm is set. I am ahead of him by two paces, reading the next section while he clears the last.
The second level. The channels are wider here, the grooves cut deeper into the stone. The calcification is thicker. Each section takes longer. My fingers ache from pressing into the grooves.
At the fourth junction, the chisel slips.
A wrong sound. Sharper than calcification separating. Stone on stone. I put my hand in the channel. A chip in the wall. The size of my thumbnail. If we pour through this section, the venom will leak and the pressure will drop.
I feel past the chip. Past the junction. There. A second groove. Cut parallel to the main channel, six inches below it. A bypass.
“There’s the overflow route,” I say. “Right where my drawing shows it. We reroute through the lower groove and skip the damaged section.”
He clears the calcification from both ends. The backup channel is in perfect condition. Never carried flow. Waiting.
My forearms burn. Hours of running my fingertips along stone, feeling the distinction between calcification and original carving. The fine muscles in my hands are starting to fail. I put my palms flat on his coils.
The warmth transfers through my skin immediately. Runs up my forearms, into my wrists, into the small muscles of my fingers. The shaking stops. My fingers come back to me. It runs further this time, into my shoulders, down my back, into the knee that quit at the river. His body has been feeding this building for years. Tonight it feeds me.
I take my hands off his coils and go back to the wall.
Somewhere around the sixth junction, the work changes.
I stop marking before he needs to see the mark. I move to the next section and my hand is already in the groove and thecharcoal line is already down when I hear the chisel bite behind me. He is not waiting for my signal. He is reading my rhythm. The strike lands as my fingers leave the stone.
We are not working in sequence anymore. We are working in parallel. My hand and his chisel moving through one system, two bodies clearing one architecture, and the rhythm we’ve found is not something either of us set. It found us.
He says the word. Quietly. Under his breath, aimed at the stone, not at me. The old word, from the doorway. He says it to the building while his chisel strikes the wall I’ve just marked.
I keep working. I catch the word and I do not let myself stop to feel it. Not yet.
At the seventh junction the ceiling groans. A crack in the lintel. He puts his shoulder against the doorframe and braces while I finish clearing the junction. The scales where it hits the stone go dark. Bruised. He does not make a sound.
“Vadh.”
“It’s fine. Keep going.”
The last junction. The primary feed.
