Overflow

The grate under Tavo Narindu's hands was talking to him, and if he read it wrong, it would be the last thing that ever did.

He'd found it two weeks back: a service grille sunk into the flooded floor of the market sump, where a feeder line to the Concern's main Sluice ran close enough to the surface that its housing wept a thread of Current into the standing water whenever the pressure upstream spiked. Nobody had noticed the leak. Nobody was going to. It ran about as fast as a slow drip off a roof, which was exactly why it was worth Tavo's time and nobody else's — too small to trip a district meter, too small to matter to anyone who wasn't counting Wela's Fathoms like coins in a jar that kept losing weight no matter how carefully he filled it.

He crouched at the grate with his sleeve rolled to the elbow, the brass rim biting cold half-moons into his knees, and listened.

Water dripped somewhere behind him with a flat, unhelpful rhythm, no use for timing anything. What he wanted was under that: the ring of ceramic soles on iron catwalk, two sets, coming and going on their loop through the sump the way they had every night this month. Reclaimer boots. The Concern didn't waste real leather down here, not on men whose whole job was walking a wet grid and writing down numbers nobody upstairs read twice.

There. Faint, off to his left, past the second support column — a double click, click-click, the drag of a heel through standing water between steps. He held still and counted.

One patrol, walking the grate line above him at the pace of men who'd walked it a thousand nights and stopped caring. Three-quarters of a second between footfalls when the footing was dry. Closer to a full second when they hit the wet patch by the collapsed stair, because nobody in a soaked boot trusts a soaked floor, not even when they've crossed it every night of their working life. Tavo had learned that the hard way, the first month he'd tried this, when he'd timed a pull to the dry-floor rhythm and nearly had a Reclaimer's lamp in his face over a patch of water he hadn't accounted for. He still flinched a little at the memory, a small, private, entirely justified flinch.

The system had a name for the trick, once he'd gotten good enough at it to notice himself getting good.

[Skill Advancement Available: Current Ear (Rank 2) — Rank 3]

He ignored it. Notifications didn't keep him dry and they didn't keep him alive; they just told him things he mostly already knew, a half-beat late, like a friend who repeats the punchline after everyone's already laughing.

The patrol's footsteps rounded the second column — he had the shape of their loop memorized down to the yard, twenty-two paces from the column to the stair, eleven from the stair to the blind corner where the catwalk kinked around a support strut. He did the math the way he always did it, fast and without pride in it: twenty-two paces gave him roughly sixteen seconds before they'd have line of sight down into the sump floor, if either of them happened to glance over the rail. They usually didn't. Usually wasn't the same as never, and never was the only number Tavo actually cared about.

He put two fingers into the grate's weeping seam, found the place where Current leaked thinnest and steadiest instead of coming in a rush that would show up bright on anyone's meter, and opened his Wick.

[Wick Draw activated — siphoning at trickle rate, below meter threshold]

It felt the way it always felt: cold first, up through his fingers and into his wrist, like plunging his hand into water two degrees off freezing, and then a slow gold warmth behind it as the Current came through him and into the little glass vial cupped in his other palm. Not his Current. Never his, not really — a Wick didn't grow you anything, didn't build a stat sheet worth boasting about at a Draw registry, and nobody who registered a Draw at all would ever put his name on this one. All it did was let him be a very narrow, very patient hole in a wall that wasn't supposed to have one.

Footsteps. Ten paces past the column now. Nine seconds left, by his count, maybe ten if the wet patch slowed them more than usual tonight.

The vial filled by degrees, a faint gold film climbing its inside wall like the world's saddest tide chart. He watched it the way he watched everything down here — with the specific, ungenerous attention of a man who had already run out of the kind of luck that covers for a mistake.

Six paces from the stair. He could hear the second Reclaimer's voice now, low, a fragment of complaint about the smell, and the first one's answering grunt that meant shut up and keep walking, the universal night-shift dialect.

The vial was three-quarters full. Enough for Wela's dose tomorrow with something left in reserve for the day after. Not enough — never quite enough, that was the whole shape of his life these days — but enough for tomorrow, and tomorrow was as far ahead as he let himself plan on a grate floor with somebody's boots six paces out.

He closed the Wick.

The cold cut off like a tap turned hard. His fingers ached with it, a deep-set throb that would fade to background noise in an hour, the same as it always did. He capped the vial fast, before the Lift inside it could start thinning the way siphoned Current always did once it left the line it came from, usable for a day or two and worthless after. He dropped flat against the column's shadow and became, as far as two bored men on a nightly circuit were concerned, a stretch of wet stone that had always been there.

Their boots passed twelve feet overhead. Neither of them looked down.

One talent and it's this, Wela liked to say. Congratulations. You could get a job scaring pigeons.

He gave it a slow ten-count after the footsteps faded before he let his shoulders drop the two inches they'd been holding since he sat down. Overhead, the sump's ceiling leaked a thin gray light down through a drainage grate, the closest thing to sky this level ever saw, and it caught the vial in his hand and turned it the color of weak tea. A full pull. A clean one. Nobody the wiser, and nothing on any meter to tell the Concern that a hole existed in their wall at all.

[Current Ear advanced to Rank 3 — patrol cadence now readable through one intervening wall]

That last part was new. He filed it away with the small, practical satisfaction of a man who has just been handed a tool he didn't know to ask for. A wall between him and a patrol used to mean guessing. Now, apparently, it meant something closer to hearing through it — useful, if he ever found himself somewhere with a wall worth listening through instead of open grating. He didn't have anywhere like that in mind yet. He filed that away too.

He should have gone straight home. He almost always went straight home.

Instead he found himself standing a minute longer at the base of the ladder, turning that math over again out of habit, because something about tonight's count hadn't matched the pattern in his head — the spacing had been a half-step tighter than usual, like the two Reclaimers had somewhere to be. He climbed anyway, wrung the worst of the water out of his sleeve against the ladder rail, and started for the surface stair — and that was when the second patrol crossed his path.

They came out of a side channel he'd never once seen a Reclaimer use, moving in a tight double file instead of the loose, bored spacing every other patrol kept, boots striking the walkway in a clipped unison that had nothing lazy in it at all. Four of them, not two. He flattened into the stairwell's shadow without deciding to, the way his body had learned to do that faster than his head could argue with it, and watched them pass fifteen feet away without so much as a glance in his direction.

They weren't hunting anyone. That was almost worse. They were running a route like a route they'd been given that morning and told to learn cold, checking sightlines instead of walking a habit — the difference between a man patrolling and a man rehearsing. One of them carried a calibration rod instead of the usual lamp, the long brass kind Tavo had only ever seen carried by Sluice engineers doing scheduled maintenance, and none of this was scheduled maintenance, not down here, not at this hour.

Draw Season wasn't due for weeks. The city didn't usually start tightening its grip this early, and when it did, it was never for a reason that made things easier on anyone standing where Tavo was standing. He filed the wrongness of it away next to everything else he had no room to worry about tonight and kept walking, the vial a small, careful weight against his chest the rest of the way home.

·  ·  ·

The stairwell up to the Narindu rooms smelled the way it always did, wet plaster and somebody two floors down frying fish oil too hot, and Tavo took the last flight two steps at a time the way he had every night for three years, vial held flat against his chest like it might spill sideways if he jostled it.

The door was unlatched. Wela never left it unlatched.

"You're up," he said, coming in sideways to close it quiet, and then he saw her by the lamp and the sentence just stopped being the thing he meant to say.

She was sitting up against the wall, knees drawn to her chest, a blanket pulled crooked over one shoulder, and her sleeve was pushed back to the elbow the way it never was unless she'd been checking it herself, over and over, in the dark, alone, before he got home to see.

Her Waterline had always run a pale, steady gold, thin as it was, the kind of band a low-district kid earned by being alive and doing occasional honest work. Tonight it looked like a lamp behind wet paper. A full shade dimmer than it had been that morning, easy, maybe more, and there was a place near her wrist where the light didn't sit even, like water finding a low spot in a floor.

"Don't," she said, before he could get a word out, in the flat voice she used when she already knew what his face was about to do. "I timed it against yesterday's mark on the wall. It's not you seeing things. I checked twice because I didn't believe it the first time either."

He crossed the room and crouched by her, and the vial in his hand, three-quarters full, a clean pull he'd been proud of twenty minutes ago, suddenly weighed nothing at all.

"That's not one night's slide," he said. His voice came out steadier than he felt, which was its own kind of skill, the only one that mattered right now. "The healer said Fathom Two could hold for weeks yet."

"The healer," Wela said, "also charges by the visit, so I wouldn't take her word as scripture." She tried for the dry edge she always used to flatten things out, and it almost worked, except her hand found the inside of her own wrist without her seeming to send it there, thumb pressing the dim spot like she could push the light back up through her skin by will alone. "I think I'm past Two, Tavo. I think I went to Three sometime after you left."

He didn't say anything for a second. There wasn't a version of the next sentence that didn't make it worse, so he held the vial out instead, like that could answer for him, like three-quarters of a clean pull from a market grate could possibly be the same size as whatever had just happened to his sister in one night, unsupervised, while he'd been crouched in sewage congratulating himself on his footwork.

"That's tomorrow's dose," he said. "Maybe the day after, if we stretch it."

Wela looked at the vial, and then at him, and the joke she was reaching for didn't quite land this time; it came out smaller than she meant it, the corners worn off it. "You're going to need a bigger sewer, Tavo."

"I noticed something else down there tonight," he said, because it was easier than sitting in the silence her joke had left behind. "Reclaimers running a route I've never seen. Four of them instead of two. Carrying gear I've only seen on maintenance crews."

"Draw Season," Wela said, like it was obvious, like she hadn't just watched her own arm dim a full shade in the time it took him to go to work and come home.

"Draw Season's weeks off."

"Maybe somebody moved it up." She said it flat, without much interest, the way a person talks about weather they've already decided they can't do anything about. Then, quieter, dropping the performance for just long enough that he almost wished she hadn't: "Doesn't matter what they moved. I don't think I've got weeks, Tavo. I think I've got days, and I think you know it too."

He didn't have an answer for that either. He just sat down next to her on the floor, close enough that their shoulders touched, and watched the dim gold light on her wrist the way he'd watched the vial fill twenty minutes ago — with the same ungenerous, unblinking attention, because it was the only thing he knew how to give a problem that refused to hold still long enough to be solved.