Chapter 110: THE DRY SIDE

The first thing Caspian put on the table was a length of cracked timber. Sio stared at it until Caspian pushed a folded drawing beside it, showing the carriage wall trapped beneath the collapsed support.

"That beam carries part of the roof," Caspian said. "We can’t free the release wheel until somebody braces what’s above it. Even then, we don’t know if turning it is safe."

Mara stood across from him in the outer checkpoint’s workroom. Behind the shut door, Kell was helping the medic change Eda’s dressing; Sio could hear a bowl clink whenever someone shifted beside her cot. "I’ve got two screw jacks and enough timber for a temporary support," Mara said. "Not a pumping crew."

"Can we carry them there without damaging the approach?" Sio asked.

"By hand, along the upper bank. No cart on those drainage stones." Mara pointed to a woman testing tools near the threshold. "Tera maintains our old culverts. She knows how to recognize a failing support. That doesn’t make her an Arcline engineer."

Tera tested a jack’s ratchet with her thumb. Its teeth caught with a dry snap. "I’ll tell you what I trust and what I don’t. Don’t ask me to pretend they’re the same."

Angle came in carrying a canvas bag of flexible water tubing, sealed cups and two slim inspection lamps. Fern followed with Sterling’s damaged projection flickering above her wrist. His diagram came from the same thirty-eight-percent Legacy Index fragment, and the section beyond the wreck still dissolved into pale gaps.

"The four-notch marker belongs to an old relief branch," Sterling said. "There’s a secondary outlet on the plan. Whether the collision crushed it is absent from my charmingly incomplete collection of facts."

"Enough to inspect from outside," Caspian said. He copied the outlet symbol onto a separate sheet, leaving their approach route unmarked. Fern kept the Index device at the checkpoint.

Sio glanced at the courier ledger near Mara’s elbow. Aureole’s envelope was listed as dispatched, with no receipt yet. Mara followed his gaze. "No word from my courier. Nobody’s coming to fix this just because you drew a ring on paper."

"Then we do what we can reach," Sio said, taking a length of tubing from Angle. "Water and light first."

They departed through the screened service exit after Mara’s watch cleared the upper bank. Rhea walked ahead with Tera, her bandaged hand tucked inside her sleeve. The jacks were awkward between Sio and Caspian; every change in footing made their handles knock against the timber. Gumm curled around Sio’s collar and stretched after the moving straps until Sio tucked him back.

The four cuts above the circle appeared through silt. Caspian checked them against his sketch before taking the group into the channel beneath the hill. Wet clay gave way to the odor of iron and old paint. Water struck the carriage’s underside in uneven beats, muffling sounds from deeper inside.

Tera made them set the jacks down well short of the folded beam. She scraped a line in the dust beside the support column. "See how that plaster pulled apart? The roof moved after the collision. I can’t tell you whether it happened this morning or last month. Nobody stands under that fracture."

Sio could see the release wheel half buried beyond the beam. They kept to the shell’s outer margin, clear of the fractured ceiling. Angle glanced at the wheel and turned back to the panel. "Let’s tell them we’re here."

Sio tapped twice against the white shell. Three faint knocks answered, followed by a cough.

"It’s us," he called through the seam. "We brought water and a lamp. Can you reach the opening?"

A hand appeared, withdrawing when somebody shifted behind it. "Barely. The lower seal’s leaking worse. The gauge is almost at the red mark."

"Don’t go near the release," Tera told Sio, following the line of water beneath the buckled panel. "That gauge tells us there’s pressure, not where the water will go when it gets out."

They fed one end of a clean, flexible tube through the only gap clear of jagged metal. There was enough length for the person inside to draw it well away from the opening and pass it among the six, rather than make everyone crowd the seam. Caspian raised the clean canister above the tube’s far end to keep a gentle gravity-fed flow. Sio held the outer section clear of the sharp edge while the prisoner guided the other end.

A cough sounded behind the wall, then a few slow swallows. "I have it," the voice said. "Give us a moment. I’ll pass it around."

Sio stayed crouched as the canister grew lighter in Caspian’s hands. A second voice asked for a turn. Someone farther back made a strained joke Sio couldn’t hear well enough to understand, but a brief, exhausted laugh followed it. When the first prisoner asked for another slow flow, Caspian raised the canister again. They couldn’t leave the tube in the damaged seam, and nothing here promised a lasting supply. At least the six could drink now.

When the prisoners had finished drinking, they withdrew the tube. Angle eased one slim sealed lamp through the same opening. It caught against the metal; he withdrew it and turned it sideways instead of forcing it. This time a hand received it. Amber light spread beneath the panel and illuminated several fingers braced against the inside floor.

Sio remembered how the emergency lights had flickered on their last visit. The new glow held steady when someone moved the lamp. He watched the fingers uncurl from the seam, then turned toward Tera as she examined the exterior rib.

Caspian brought a jack forward, but dust slipped from a crack above the crushed carriage. Tera raised her hand before he entered the shadow of the fractured ceiling. She traced the crack from a distance. It ended short of an exposed steel rib against the outer wall, with a patch of intact rock beyond the visibly unstable section.

"Set the jack there," she said, indicating the firm rock outside the cracked ceiling’s fall zone. "A timber pad against that outer rib. We’re taking up slack, not lifting the roof or moving the beam."

Caspian set the base while Tera checked its footing. She positioned the pad, gave the handle one cautious turn, then another until resistance reached her fingers. She stopped immediately. A high, intermittent chatter from the outer rib softened, though water continued striking the panel and the fractured roof remained unchanged. They left the second jack unused.

"That might keep the loose rib from shaking against the wall," Tera said. "It doesn’t make this carriage safe to enter. Nobody goes under the cracked section."

Rhea stood beyond the column, listening. "Water’s running behind that rubble. Different rhythm from the stream we came through."

Tera approached the blocked relief branch from the solid side of the passage. She heard a steady hiss too. Sterling’s old diagram placed an outlet beyond the rubble, but an audible trickle didn’t prove that it connected to the flooded shaft.

"We need to expose the outlet from outside and test where it leads," Tera said. "If it’s isolated from the shaft, opening it won’t relieve pressure at the door."

Sio held the empty canister by its handle. "Bren wanted you to know he remembers the door," he called into the seam. "He hasn’t forgotten anyone behind it."

"Tell him the guards argued over that shaft before the crash," the prisoner replied. "They knew something was wrong. They wouldn’t tell us what."

A faint scrape traveled through the carriage. The prisoner stopped speaking. "Wait. Knocking. From the far partition, I think."

Sio put down the canister. At first he heard only dripping water and a slight creak from the outer rib. Then four quick impacts reached him through the metal. He felt two of them in the shell beneath his fingertips.

Angle crouched beside him. Connected carriage ribs could carry a blow from somewhere else in the wreck, so neither the sound nor its apparent direction proved who had made it. It might be a person signaling beyond the next partition, or something loose shifting against metal.

"Keep the lamp somewhere safe," Sio told the voice. "We’ll come back with equipment to check the water. Don’t try to open the far door."

They left the lamp with the prisoners and inspected the jack before departing. Rhea led the return along the dry shelf of the opposite bank rather than back over their outbound tracks. Caspian recorded the possible outlet on his survey sketch without marking a route to Safe Node Seven. There was still no reply from Aureole’s courier when they reached the outer checkpoint.

Mara met them in the workroom. "What changed?"

"They’ve had clean water, and we left them a working lamp," Sio said, setting down the empty canister. "They’ll need more supplies soon. Tera got a little support under one outer rib, and we found a possible outlet. We don’t know whether it connects to the flooded shaft."

"And the people past the next door?"

"We heard four knocks. Could be another prisoner, but the metal carries sound. We can’t confirm where it started."

Mara studied Tera’s sketch. "Then we prepare a crew to inspect the external outlet. The message is still out there. Until someone answers, we plan with the people and tools we actually have."

Sio glanced at the empty place where the Aureole envelope had been. The prisoners had water in their stomachs, a lamp that wouldn’t die with the emergency circuit, and someone working on a way through. Beyond the next partition, something had knocked four times. He intended to find out what made that sound before anyone turned the wrong wheel.