Shift Seven: Breaching the Fire Door

The iron bells for the morning handover would strike in twenty minutes.

Pima waited behind the south linen presses where the laundry corridor narrowed into the drainage alcove. Her damp smock clung to her shoulder blades, heavy with the boiled-vinegar smell of South Ward's morning wash. In her pocket, wrapped inside the folded linen schematic of Kaba's footings, the resin-coated latch key pressed hard against her hip bone.

Footsteps scuffed the wet flagstones. Jala came around the partition carrying a three-foot pinch bar wrapped in greasy burlap. He set the wrapped iron against a timber stanchion with a dull thud.

"Sari is in the dispensary signing the night log," Jala said. His voice was a low rasp under the steady hiss of the floor drains. "She’ll be at the zinc desk by the third bell. If the intake dial twitches when we crack the lower seal, she’ll see the needle drop."

"The flue was venting directly into cot nine," Pima said. "The air balance is already ruined. A five-pound pressure dip won't look any different from the boiler surge."

Jala rubbed his thumb over the scarred knuckle of his right hand. "The sub-sluice hasn't swung on its pins since the winter before last. If the hinges bind and snap, we won't get it shut before the day orderly brings down the tallow buckets."

"Then we don't snap them." Pima pushed past him into the alcove.

The fire door blocked the end of the lower conduit, a solid slab of pig iron four inches thick, seated directly into the dressed granite of the hospice’s foundation. Decades of salt-laden humidity had coated the plates in a scaly patina of green corrosion, sealed with a slick sheen of black condensation. At chest height, a rectangular keyway sat recessed inside a heavy box lock, ringed by four forged rivets.

Pima pulled the iron key from her apron. She slid the bit into the keyway, but the barrel stopped short after two inches, jammed on a hard plug of crystallized brine and lint.

"Leave it," Jala muttered, lifting the pry bar. "I'll take the latch from the jamb."

"No. You'll shear the keeper off inside the casing," Pima said. "Then the deadbolt drops into the sill groove and we'll need a sledge."

She took the brass scraper from her tool roll. Working by the dim orange lantern light from the hallway, she angled the flat edge into the keyway, gouging out flakes of greenish-white crust until the metal clicked clean against iron tumblers. She blew the residue clear, coated the key's teeth in a smear of tallow from her pocket tin, and eased it back into the hole.

The key seated to the collar, but when she twisted it clockwise, the mechanism locked tight against forty pounds of settled deadweight.

Pima stepped back and set her hand flat against the lower seam of the frame. The iron was cold, but the granite lintel above it was warm and slightly wet.

"The jamb settled two inches to the left," she said, tapping the lower hinge plate. "The weight of the upper wall is resting directly on the strike pin. That’s why the bolt won't draw. You aren't fighting rust. You're fighting the entire south wing."

"Then we're done," Jala said. "A pinch bar won't lift fifty tons of stone."

"We don't need to lift the stone. We just need to level the hinge knuckle."

Pima reached into her kit and retrieved her cherry-wood leverage peg. She dropped to one knee on the slick flagstones, positioning the tapered end of the hardwood wedge into the half-inch gap beneath the lower hinge leaf.

"Put the bar's heel against the lintel rib," she told Jala. "Not horizontal. Forty-five degrees upward. When I drive the wedge, pull the bar toward your chest. Don't lever it out. Lift it."

Jala wedged the chisel point of his bar into the seam above the upper knuckle. His broad shoulders bunched under his woolen tunic. "If the masonry blows out, Sari will deduct the bar from my final ration settlement."

"Hold your breath and lift," Pima said.

Jala threw his bulk against the lever. The iron bar groaned, the greasy burlap tearing under his palms. Pima struck the heel of the cherry-wood peg with the flat face of her brass scraper, driving the hardwood wedge deep into the lower clearance gap.

The door gave a sharp, metallic pop. The settled frame shifted an eighth of an inch upward, taking the vertical load off the lock casing.

"Now," Pima said.

She gripped the resin-coated key with both hands and threw her weight into the turn.

Inside the iron housing, two heavy spring levers snapped back with a sound like a pistol shot. The bolt slid clear of the strike plate.

Jala eased the bar down. He braced his boots against the drainage channel and pulled the heavy brass ring handle set into the door's center.

With a long, tearing screech of rusted metal tearing free from dried salt seals, the four-inch iron slab swung outward into the alcove.

Pima braced herself for the expected surge of suffocating, swamp-thick heat that had choked the eastern stairwell.

Instead, a dead, freezing draft rolled out from the yawning opening.

The cold was instantaneous and dry, smelling faintly of old lime and pulverized slate. It hit Pima's damp linen smock like a bucket of well-water, turning the hot sweat along her neck into an icy crust.

Ahead of them, a flight of narrow stone steps plunged straight down into absolute dark. The humid air of the hospice curled at the threshold, turning into dense white vapor as it met the subterranean draft, dissolving before it touched the fifth step.

Jala stared into the blackness, the pry bar hanging slack in his calloused hand. His breath drifted out in a pale, trembling plume.

"That isn't marsh air," he whispered.

Pima tightened her apron ties, pulled the lantern from the alcove peg, and stepped across the iron threshold into the cold.