Reading in Borrowed Light

The linen store smelled of lye soap gone stale in the folds of dry cotton, and under it, faint as a held breath, the clove oil that had soaked into Pima's apron pocket overnight. She'd wedged herself between two shelves of folded sheets, blueprint on one knee, logbook on the other, and the daylight coming through the transom was the wrong color entirely—thin and gray-white, nothing like the oil lamp she'd worked by all through the night just past. She had four hours before the dormitory matron came looking for her. She meant to spend every minute of it here.

She had not slept. She was not going to.

Tano's blueprint was a cross-section: a row of granite piers, a lattice of grooves he'd carved to channel corrosive runoff into the load-bearing stone. She'd read that part in chapter and verse a few hours ago. What she hadn't cracked was the column of numbers running down the logbook's last third, each one paired with a letter and a compass mark. N-14. S-9. E-22. Tano's hand, but not his classroom hand—this was shorthand, the kind he'd used for himself, for speed, never meant for another reader.

She turned the blueprint sideways, lined its grid against the numbers, and felt the old, familiar itch of a problem that hadn't given up yet.

Root stock intervals, he'd labeled the column, back at the top of the page, in words instead of shorthand. Spacing between growth points. She'd assumed piers. Foundation piers, evenly set, exactly the distance his grooves would need to be useful.

But the numbers didn't match the piers. She'd paced the gap between the first and second pier walking past them last night, heel to heel in the dark. Fourteen feet, near enough. Not fourteen inches.

Her fingers went still on the page.

Fourteen inches was a duct measurement. She knew it because her fingers had found that exact span last night, working Tano's bundle free from the bend of the sheet-metal baffle above cot nine, one seam and then a second under her knuckles before the bundle gave. Fourteen inches, then a joint, then nine, then a joint. She hadn't thought about the spacing since. She hadn't needed to.

She needed to now.

N-14 wasn't a compass bearing on the foundation map at all. It was a duct run, north branch, and the growth wasn't going to wait in the piers where the fire door kept it locked below the sluice. It was already up in the ward's air system, threaded through the ductwork that ran over every bed in South Ward, the same ductwork that had delivered the humidity that nearly killed seven patients in their sleep at midnight. She'd assumed that surge came up from the floor. She'd been wrong, or half wrong, and the half she'd missed was worse.

Pima set the logbook down and pressed the heel of her hand against her eye, hard, until the ache in it told her something besides the numbers.

If Tano's network ran the ducts, it wasn't waiting below for the fire door to fail. It was already in the ceiling over every patient Kaba had left, and it had been there the whole time she'd been hunting a way down.

The store's outer door scraped.

"Inventory," Sari said, before Pima had even looked up, in the voice she used for rounds—flat, already bored with whatever answer was coming. "Sheet count before lockdown. Don't tell me you're hiding from the dormitory matron in my linens."

Pima folded the blueprint once, fast, and slid it under the stack of pillow slips on her knee, logbook going flat against her stomach under her apron in the same motion, a single smooth fold she'd practiced without knowing she was practicing it.

"Counting spoons," she said. "Since somebody has to."

Sari's mouth didn't move, but something in her shoulders did, the closest thing to a laugh Pima had gotten out of her yet. "We don't count spoons. We count sheets, blankets, and gauze rolls, in that order, because the hydraulics don't care what you forgot when they seal." She stepped past the shelf, reaching for the inventory slate hung by the door, and her eyes went, briefly, to Pima's lap. "You look like you slept in a ditch."

"Feels about right."

"The matron's already asked once this morning why you weren't in your bunk." Sari pulled three pillow slips from the stack at Pima's knee—the stack with the folded blueprint one layer beneath—and counted them against the slate without unfolding a single one. "Ask again, I stop covering for you."

"Noted."

Sari looked at her a half second longer than counting sheets required. Pima held still, hands loose on her own knee, the logbook's spine a hard line against her ribs where any sudden breath would show it. Whatever Sari saw—exhaustion, or something else—she didn't ask about it. She marked the slate, turned, and left the way she'd come, the door scraping shut behind her exactly as it had scraped open.

Pima didn't move until she heard Sari's footsteps fade down the corridor toward the main stores.

Then she let the breath out she'd been holding and unfolded the blueprint again, hands steadier than they had any right to be.

Four hours before the matron came looking. Somewhere under the floor, the hydraulic mains were already resetting for the next cycle, and the dial in the receiving hall had read six when Pima crossed it at handover—six shifts left before the counter hit zero and the sea gates closed for the season. Six more nights to trace the ducts before the lock shut the question away behind a week of silence she couldn't argue with.

She could wait. Sleep the four hours she was owed, come back fresh tonight, work from strength instead of exhaustion.

Or she could go back up to South Ward right now, while the day nurses were busy with morning meals and the light gave her cover instead of a lantern to hide, and find out how far the ducts ran past cot nine before tonight's shift buried the question under another night of dark.

She had four hours. She had six nights after that, and not one more.

Pima folded the blueprint back into quarters, tucked it inside her apron beside the logbook, and stood up from between the shelves.

Four hours wasn't a luxury. It was the only ground she had left to lose.

She went to find the ladder.