They found the shaft by accident, which is how you meet the parts of a city that matter. A round mouth, rim of concrete chewed down to bone, a throat armored in ribbed steel descending into its own dark. Someone long dead had painted a caution ring around the opening in a yellow that time had rusted into tea. The stencil ghost above it said R–12 MAIN FEED and, fainter, the numbers you say when you want to pretend machines keep promises: 12:00 / 18:00. Someone had crossed both out with a grease finger and written DECOM.
"Old rain," Tella said, crouching at the lip, her voice coming back up to her in an echo with bad posture. "Tap's supposed to be killed."
Lig's light traced the inner curve. "Supposed to," he said. His tone took the measure of the word and found it short.
The air was different here. Not the hot breath of ducts, not the oily hum of trunks. A hollow coolness. The faint, clean smell of metal that has not been asked to work in a long time. Breuk stood a pace back and felt the pendant behind his shirt go colder, as if remembering an old lover and deciding to be proud about it.
"Vertical climb?" Frehn asked, peering in like a boy into a well that might be a story.
"Staggered," Lig answered. His lamp caught ladder rungs welded into the shaft lining at intervals, maintenance alcoves carved like shallow mouths every ten meters. "Rungs on the wall, pockets for breath. Safer than the last hour we took."
From the back, Haim said, "Safer than the last year," and immediately looked ashamed of the optimism. Sera squeezed his elbow. Lio peered between grown-up hips and made the shape with her mouth she made whenever she decided to be brave. Breuk saw it and had to look away.
They rigged the rope the way they rigged the day: in thirds. Tella checked the anchors twice, then a third time, then smiled to herself like an apology no one needed. Lig assigned positions without sounding like he was doing it. The old woman with rope-ankles was paired with the boy who had lost his bowl helmet, because mercy likes symmetry. Breuk tied himself into the first line, a knot he hated for being good enough. The shaft swallowed their lamp beams one by one as they leaned in.
"Single file," Lig said. "Hands, feet, words. Don't hurry. Hurrying is just fear with better shoes."
He went first. The metal took him like a sentence it had been waiting to finish. Tella followed with a coil and a dangling carabiner that ticked softly against the ladder like a metronome for breath. Then Frehn, shoulders hunched, jacket scraping, pike lashed to his back so he wouldn't spear hope by accident. Then the old woman and the boy. Then Haim, Sera, Lio, their faces turned up to Breuk when he leaned in after them and put his boot on the first rung.
The shaft turned sound into something honest. Every footfall came back smaller but truer. The rungs had a film of old dust and newer damp. Breath thinned out and cooled. Breuk's right palm stung where steam had kissed it earlier; he curled fingers around iron and felt all the work he had ever done show up in his joints and ask if it was invited.
"Ten meters," Lig's voice floated up. "Pocket."
They made the first alcove and pulled in, pressed shoulder to shoulder in the shallow rectangle while the next bodies gathered to them like thread to a needle. The alcove had a stencil: RESPR SATURDAY in letters that had never met a Saturday. Someone had written, smaller, a long time ago: it's always saturday somewhere. Below, the line moved, the rope hissed soft through hands, the shaft swallowed faces and coughed them up again.
"Keep going," Lig said, and he did, and they did.
It became a rhythm. Rung, rung, rung, pocket. Hands shuffled hips, breath traded places, a child's laugh once and then not again because the shaft told it what shape to be. Tella tapped rungs as she went, testing welds with a mechanic's knuckles. Frehn counted under his breath until numbers got embarrassed and left. The old woman hummed something that wasn't the rain song and the shaft allowed it.
At the third pocket, Haim lifted the wind chime out of his pack—just to check it had not become a dream. He didn't lift it enough to make a sound. Sera took Lio's wrist and put Lio's hand on the rungs in a way that taught a lesson without humiliating the student. Breuk watched all this without moving his face. He tried to lend his balance down the rope the way one lends money and never expects it back.
On the fourth pocket, the shaft changed its mind.
It began with the kind of sound you hear in sleep and name later. A distant note. Not a hum. Not the city's engine-chord. A pressure assembling itself. The air on Breuk's cheek cooled and tightened, like a hand making itself a fist two rooms away. Tella's head turned, cat-fast. Lig's lamp went still.
"What is it?" Frehn whispered, and the shaft returned his whisper as a rebuke.
Lig didn't answer. He pressed his palm to the wall. The metal had a pulse now. Not a beat; a warning. He lifted his eyes to the stencil above the pocket and Breuk saw the math move behind them. R–12 MAIN FEED. 12:00 / 18:00. DECOM.
"How late?" Lig asked without looking up.
Breuk didn't wear a watch. He wore city habits. He looked at nothing and felt the way the under-ducts breathe at certain hours, the throb that tells kitchens it is time, the way the engine-sun doesn't shift but men do anyway. "Close," he said, and the word fell down his chest like a coin with bad news on the other side.
"Supposed to be dead," Tella said. She was talking to the shaft now as one craftsperson talks to another. "Supposed to."
The pressure grew. Not a rush. The slow authority of systems waking. A far valve remembering what it was built for. The air in the shaft began to taste of iron, the kind of iron that makes clean cuts.
"Pocket five is bigger," Lig said. "Go." He didn't raise his voice. It grew teeth anyway.
They went. Rungs are slower when your head is full. Metal announced itself through gloves. The rope turned into a living thing and then back to rope. The pocket arrived as a rectangle of shadow marked by a maintenance placard that had been brave once. They poured into it: Lig, Tella, Frehn, the old woman, the boy, Haim, Sera, Lio, two more from the second rope group, three from the third. Twelve bodies in a box built for six. The pocket had an access hatch bolted shut and a grated floor with a drain that had long ago decided to be a bowl.
The sound arrived.
Not the rain's sweet hiss, not the domestic drum. A column. A throat finding voice. The shaft's depth filled with the roar of water making itself a decision. The first blast hit somewhere far below, found round, and took it. The roar came up the way truth comes up when you run out of lies.
"Out," Lig said, and it meant "out of the main passage."
There was nowhere "out" to go. The pocket's hatch had six corroded bolts and a handle that could tell you stories about men who had sworn at it. Tella's wrench was already in her hand. She set teeth. The first bolt moved like a stubborn god. The second squealed. The third snapped. The water sound swelled. A winter you hadn't paid for touching your spine.
"Rope," Breuk said to no one, to everyone. He hooked it with his elbow, pulled, looped it across torsos as if string could teach water ethics.
Below, on the rungs, voices.
"Up! Up!"
Feet stumbled on metal. The rope went tight, then slack, then sang. The water was not yet here and already it had begun to take their breath and turn it into coin for its own pockets.
Lig kicked the hatch. Tella spun the fourth bolt. Frehn jammed his shoulder to the seam and pushed with a sound a boy makes when he is deciding to be a man whether he wants to or not. The hatch shifted. Air from within, colder, older, moved across their faces like a forgotten aunt.
"Inside!" Lig snapped.
They went through in an ugliness that had no shame. Hands on shoulders, a knee to a thigh, a muttered apology that wasn't one—anything that got bodies past the hinge and into the maintenance stop: a narrow corridor hugging the shaft, a sliver with a rail and a ladder to nowhere, three meters of safety that could become grave if they squandered it.
Haim stood with one foot in and one out, turning to reach for Sera, who had Lio by the wrist, who had the rung in her other hand because good girls do not let go. The water found the first rung below Lio and made it private. The shock ran through the metal and into her bones; she flinched, losing count.
Breuk's body moved before he allowed himself to think. He leaned over the lip, caught Lio by the back of her shirt with his good hand, and pulled. The movement tore something in his shoulder that had been waiting for an excuse. Lio slid, twisted, hit the pocket floor with her hip and made the sound children make when they don't want to scare their mothers. Sera's fingers still had her. Haim's had Sera. There was a moment where the geometry of love held.
The water arrived.
It came as a wall because walls are what men understand. White at the edges, black at the heart, a cylinder in a cylinder, the weight of days shaking off the manners evenings had taught them. The temperature changed the way seasons change in lying stories. The roar swallowed names and spit out warnings in their shape.
"Hold!" Tella shouted, though the thing that listened to her was not water but the terror in human wrists. The pocket's grate tanged under the first spray. The first breath people took after that belonged to the shaft, not to them.
Lig and Frehn hauled Sera by the waist. Breuk had Lio in both arms now because fear turns absence into strength for a second. Haim made a step that was not a step; his boot skated against a rung that had become language for frictionless. The rope across his chest bit. The knot—someone else's knot—held and then reconsidered. The wall of water hit the rungs below his feet and made an argument for gravity no man can debate.
For an instant he was suspended: a man between promises. His eyes met Breuk's and were not afraid. They were apologizing for something neither of them had done.
Sera screamed then—not at the water, at Haim. The scrim of spray turned her face into a broken portrait. She thrust Lio harder toward Breuk as if weight could choose to go only one way. Breuk took the girl and used his back and used his teeth and used the part of himself that hated needing anyone.
"Haim!" Sera cried, and reached, and her hand closed on his fingers. For a precious, expensive second, they were a chain stronger than rope. The water found that strength and admired it and then did not care.
Haim went. Not down—through. The wall took him the way a great mouth takes a soft fruit. Sera let out a sound that was not a sound and lunged, and the pocket had room for many things but not for that much grief. The spray took all the purchase from the grate. Her feet went from under her like a floor that had changed its mind. Lig caught her belt in one movement, dug heels into rust, and swore between his teeth as if he could insult physics into obedience.
"Don't," he told her. His voice was almost kind.
She did anyway. The human body knows how to follow its heart when the heart is wrong.
Breuk put Lio behind him against the inner wall and held her there with his body because he didn't have enough arms to hold her and Sera and the world in place. Lio made no sound now. Her heart beat through her shirt into the bones of his back and he learned its rhythm in the second he had to learn it.
The next pulse of water hit. The maintenance pocket, miracle that it was, had been built with a lip, a higher threshold meant to scold floods. The lip turned the first wall aside, mostly. The second climbed it because water is ambition that forgot shame. It came in with them and was at their ankles and then shins and then knees and every person in the pocket some part of their mind counting: depth, slope, weight, time.
"Drain," Tella said, voice tight. "Clear the damn drain."
Frehn, already on his knees, shoved fingers into the grated bowl with the idiotic bravery that belongs in ballads. Something slimy and old tried to be a snake under his hand; he pulled it anyway: a clotted beard of rags, rust, hair, the archaeology of neglect. The water spun, indecisive, then turned obedient and began to wrap the drain in its throat.
Sera had both hands on the lip now. Lig still had her belt. The water at their thighs tried to make their legs its property. She looked at Breuk. Wet hair made dark commas on her face. In that eye-shock, in that fractured beat between pulses, she remembered to be grateful and remembered to be herself.
"Take her," she said, not a plea. An order given by women who have not been allowed to give orders their whole lives. "Take her up."
"I have her," Breuk said. The shaft ate the sentence. Sera read lips; she nodded.
The third pulse hit.
It was lower—moving more slowly because the second had found so much to occupy it. That made it worse. It lifted them, all twelve, and asked them to decide what they weighed. The drain worked like a throat trying not to choke and lost that argument in dignity. Water climbed their thighs. It started to think about ribs.
The boy who had lost his helmet began to cry without noise. The old woman with rope-ankles put her palm on his crown and pressed him down into the angle between wall and rail and the gesture was so practiced Breuk knew she had been alive a very long time.
Haim was gone. The part of Breuk that collected debts made a note it would never be able to pay. The pendant burned once against his sternum, as if some metal heart had decided to protest. He wanted to tear it out and throw it into the drain and dare the water to keep it the way it had kept men. He did not. He pressed his chest to the wall instead and made his body a barrier that was only a man but tried anyway.
The fourth pulse brought a thing with it: a ripped-off panel, a piece of ladder, a corporate sign that had learned to read; it struck the pocket lip and stuck like a tooth in a wound. The flow changed. Lig saw geometry and took it by the hair.
"Up!" he barked. "Up now. The pocket won't hold the fifth."
It should have been impossible to move up with the water trying to turn motion into a thesis on failure. It wasn't. Twelve bodies went from horizontal to vertical the way guilt stands when accused. Hips ground into rungs. Knuckles bled. Lio's small hand disappeared and reappeared in Breuk's good one, tendons like violin strings under his fingers. Tella shoved the old woman upward with a grunt that remembered every wrench she had ever lifted. Frehn picked the boy and put him on a rung above his head like a package you knew was precious because it didn't look it.
Sera was the last to move, always the mother. She looked down once, because you do. The shaft returned nothing. The white fury had gone past and was now a memory that would decide to be nightmare later. She closed her eyes, opened them, put both hands on the rung above Lig's head, and climbed. Lig's jaw worked. He did not look back, because if he did the part of him that was still a boy would have broken.
They made the next pocket lunging, a clutch of animals telling a new story with their bodies. The water followed, gentler here—shoulder-deep in the pocket, lower in the shaft, sucking at ankles like a ghost that begs you to be polite.
"Inside," Lig said again. This pocket's hatch was already open—a maintenance forgetfulness that became miracle. They poured into a lateral, a slice of corridor that ran like a vein away from the shaft. For a dozen meters, the sound lessened and the air learned another temperature.
Then the family was not with them.
It was the kind of fact that arrives quietly and makes men loud later. Sera stood in the corridor, dripping, mouth open. She did not count aloud. She counted in her face. Haim: no. Lio:—
Breuk spun. Lio was behind him. He had not known he knew the weight of her hand until it was gone. He felt its absence the way you feel a tooth with your tongue. Panic is a small, fast animal; he let it run exactly one step, then caught it by the neck.
"Lio!" he yelled into noise.
The shaft roared back. The pocket lip was still visible, a mouth full of water speaking a language you only learn if you die for it. In the froth, a scrap of fabric—Sera's scarf—clung to a bolt and then decided to be a river's daughter and left. He couldn't see the girl.
Frehn put a hand on his chest. "Breuk—"
"Move," Breuk snapped without anger. It came out like a prayer with its sleeves rolled.
He stepped to the pocket mouth. The fifth pulse hit like a man who hates his father. Water threw itself into the pocket in a tantrum. Lio was there—only a blur, pressed into the pocket's inner corner where the lip met wall, a small knot that kept not coming apart. Her face was turned away; her arm stretched up, fingers spread, groping for the idea of a hand.
Breuk did not think about anything he had promised anyone. He threw his body into the pocket like a lie you tell because the truth will kill a child. The water took his feet immediately and asked to carry him somewhere he had no plans to go. He planted his knee in the grate and prayed to rust. Rust listened. He reached, grabbed Lio's wrist, felt a pulse that had an argument with fear, and pulled.
Something hit his back and made stars behind his eyes: the drifting ladder section found its joke. He grunted—short, ugly—and refused to let his grip change shape. He pulled, he swore, he said the girl's name like it was a lever, he pulled, and then Lig's hand was on his collar, and Tella's on his belt, and Frehn's on Lio's elbow, and physics said, Fine, then, have your miracle.
They went backwards into the lateral in a tangle that no ballet could love. Breuk landed on his hip and decided to pay the invoice later. Lio was on his chest like a baby animal that had not yet learned English. She coughed and water came out and she cried and he laughed without noise and Sera made a sound like a knife and reached and then all four of them were a knot and the word thank you refused to be said because it would have broken the knot's honesty.
"Haim?" Sera whispered, when she could. It was not a question. It had the shape of a question because grief sometimes needs manners.
Breuk didn't answer. He felt the pendant heat and hated it for having the bad taste to be alive. He closed his hand over it and wanted to bleed on it and did not.
The water in the shaft settled into a steady, murderous fall. The fifth pulse had been the last for now. The schedule would hold it at that height, that rage, for the long minutes that make hours out of men. The lateral shook. Drops threw themselves from the ceiling like suicides.
"We can't stay," Lig said, and there was no moment in which that sentence hadn't been true. "The next outlet will fill. We have to move while the head is constant."
Tella wiped her nose with the back of her hand. "We lost three," she said, even though everyone had already counted. The old woman with rope-ankles coughed once and shook her head as if correcting a child: two, her expression said. The old woman was still there, small and furious and refusing to be subtracted. The third was a man from the second rope group whose name Breuk hadn't learned because he had been afraid to know what it would feel like to forget it.
Sera stood. She did not make a scene. She took the scarf that was no longer hers from the floor where the water had thrown it, wrung it, and tied it at her waist like a belt that meant something. She touched Lio's hair once, a palm-long blessing, and lifted her chin.
"Move," she agreed.
What followed was the part of courage the songs always skip. A narrow passage worked by boots into something like a plan. The lateral ran along the shaft, climbed when the shaft climbed, dove when the shaft dove. Somewhere, past two bends and a door that had forgotten its hinges, it emptied into a maintenance gallery blessedly wider than the pocket, with a grill floor and a view down to the water blast they were outrunning. The roar there was a wall. You felt it in your teeth. The gallery had a catwalk bolted to one side and a rung-ladder up to a hatch that had the personality of a bureaucrat.
They took it as a unit that had learned to fake being one. Frehn carried the boy and pretended the boy was heavier than he was so the boy could feel proud later. Tella went ahead with a wrench and her faith in metal. Lig carried no one and made space for everyone. Breuk walked Lio, not lifting her, his hand on her shoulder as if her bones were a map he could read without looking. Sera walked behind them all, not because she feared being last but because grading the horizon for danger is what mothers do when they cannot bring fathers back.
When they reached the gallery, the water's body was visible—black muscle, white saliva. It hammered the shaft like an argument that would never be won. Spray came up in insults. The catwalk flexed once and then remembered it was made of steel.
"Up," Lig said, pointing to the rung-ladder. "If we can get two levels, there's a bleed-off. Head will be lower. Safer."
"Safer," Tella repeated, and didn't bother to make it a joke.
They went up. Breuk's palm had reopened; blood mixed with water and made a pink regret. Lio climbed without asking for help now—permission had been granted to be brave. Sera climbed as if the rungs were a rosary and each one absolved something. At the hatch, Tella set shoulder and tool and sang a work song under her breath that had only curse words in it. The hatch yielded. The difference in air was immediate: less spray, more dust. The city's breath instead of the shaft's.
They spilled into a corridor that had once been polished on purpose. The lights in the ceiling were dead eyes. A line of inspection windows showed nothing but the backs of machines that had had enough. The roar behind them dropped half a register.
No one spoke for a time. People arrange their breaths in a room reflexively; a kind of collective math. When someone finally did speak, it was Lio, because children place the questions no one else can hold.
"Is he… gone?" she asked, not naming Haim because names are doors and doors are heavy.
Sera knelt. Drops fell from her hair and counted the seconds it took for the world to not end. She cupped Lio's face. "He is not here," she said. It is a strange magic how true that can be without being cruel.
Lio nodded like a soldier and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. "Okay," she said. Not okay. Okay.
Breuk watched and felt something inside him fold into a smaller, harder version of itself. He had been doing that since he was a boy. Each fold had made him sharper. Each fold had taken away surface area where kindness could land. He counted them like a man counts scars in a mirror and doesn't remember when they happened.
Lig stood with his hands on his hips and looked at the hatch they'd come through and at the corridor ahead the way a man looks at chess. "We have to keep moving," he said, and it was not disrespect. It was the thing that keeps people alive.
They moved. The corridor turned. The roar of the shaft diminished behind a wall and reappeared in the pipes above them, a ghost refusing to stop singing. The pendant at Breuk's chest cooled again. He wanted it to burn. He wanted to be sure of something enough to hate it properly.
They reached another ladder, another hatch, a stairwell that had collected dust like money, a landing where someone had chalked a word in a hand Breuk recognized without ever having seen it: wait. He laughed once without telling his mouth to. He didn't wait. He pushed.
When the shaft's voice was finally far enough away to be human again, they stopped. Not to rest. To absorb. A service room with an emergency shower and a locker full of gloves designed for hands that had never bled. The floor's slope said, if you spill something, I will forgive you if you aim. They didn't spill. They sat where they were, backs to steel, spines learning to be trees again.
Sera unwrapped her scarf and wrung it out again for the sake of doing something. Lio leaned her head into Sera's ribs and shut her eyes and reached without looking until her hand found Breuk's sleeve. She didn't take it. She just made sure it was there. He looked at the spot where her fingers rested and thought of the rain days when men lifted bowls like prayers and children laughed because thirst hadn't taught them manners yet. He thought of the way he had wanted to spit in that sky when he was small, to see if it would spit back.
Tella sat cross-legged, wrench across her thighs like a pet. Frehn pretended not to be crying. The old woman with rope-ankles produced a strip of cloth that had once been part of someone's shirt and now wanted to be a bandage, and wrapped Breuk's hand with such authority he did not dare pretend not to be grateful.
"Thank you," he said. The words sounded new in his mouth. He would try them again later to see if they stayed.
Lig leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. He looked at Breuk. The look was not the one he gave crowds. It was the old one. The one from the bridge near the school when they had been boys and he had asked a question Breuk could not answer. What do you want?
Breuk met it and held it and let the question be a stone in his throat. He swallowed it without chewing. He looked away first. He put his head back against the locker and watched the fluorescent corpse above him pretend not to have ever been a sun.
Haim's wind chime wasn't in the room. He realized that suddenly and knew he had known it from the moment the water hit. He closed his eyes and saw it anyway, bones and pipe singing a crooked hymn. He opened them and saw Lio instead. It was an improvement and a punishment at once.
"We move on your count," Lig said, softer. "You say when."
Breuk laughed, then. Low, one exhale, like a man reading his own verdict and finding the punctuation sloppy. He stood. His hand hurt in the way that proves you're real. He touched Lio's hair without permission and she allowed the trespass. He met Sera's eyes. There was no blame there. That was worse.
"Now," he said.
They moved again, because a story that stops is a body on a floor.
In the hours that had not yet been born when they left the shaft behind, the roar diminished to a rumor. The corridor found others and learned to be a hallway. A light came on somewhere ahead and went out again, as if deciding. The city made a noise like a chair being dragged across a steel floor. The people who had not died kept walking.
No one spoke of the shaft. No one said the word flood. When they had to speak, they said things like careful and corner and here and count. Breuk kept a finger inside his breast pocket, pressing metal to bone until the two decided they were the same thing. It did not make him feel better.
He tried to inventory the guilt the way he inventoried tools: name, weight, use. It didn't fit in the box. It sat on the ground beside him like a machine you don't know how to turn off. He thought of Mara's door and Sef's laugh and the bed-sweet face of the girl on the Valeris floor and the way the necklace had warmed in his hand as if it knew what it meant to be chosen and not saved. He thought of Haim's easy wrists. He thought of Sera's order, take her, and recognized it as a command he would keep hearing at 12:00 and 18:00 for the rest of the life he hadn't earned.
Lig walked in front and did not look back because if he did he might see all the things he had put in front to avoid seeing what trailed him. Tella muttered to herself about gaskets and ethics. Frehn rehearsed telling the boy he had done well. The old woman planned the way her hands would hold a cup when they finally reached a niche where water fell and did not kill.
Lio stumbled once and Breuk caught her by the elbow. She looked up at him and he saw a world that had just learned how rivers work and decided to live anyway. She lifted her chin.
"Will it rain up there too?" she asked. She didn't mean water.
He opened his mouth. He closed it. He tried again and found a sentence that could live beside the others.
"Sometimes," he said. "Enough."
She nodded, satisfied with a promise that owed her nothing and owed her everything. She let go of his sleeve and took her mother's hand and walked into the light that the corridor was thinking about giving them.
Behind them, the old rain shaft kept its hour. It did what it had been made to do long after the men who made it were dust and long after the prayers that used to lift bowls to it had been banned and burned and remembered. It thundered its indifferent grace through rooms where children had once tried to taste the future with their tongues. It wrote a wet story on the inside of a city that could no longer read it. It took three lives and carried them to places no map had ever been honest enough to draw.
Breuk did not look back. If he had, the city would have punished him for sentiment by giving him a glimpse of something that would make him useless. He kept his head forward and his heart in its cage and the pendant hot and his hand hurt and his mouth shut.
They kept climbing. The tunnel bent, then broke into a stair, then promised a door, then lied, then offered a different door that turned out to be true. This is how mercy works underground. It forgets quickly; it remembers enough.
At the next rest, Lio fell asleep with her cheek on Sera's thigh and her mouth slightly open so that every third breath made a tiny whistling—a birdsong in a place that had never seen a bird. Tella dozed with the wrench under her palm like a child with a toy. Frehn's pike leaned in the corner like a pen waiting to write a clean sentence. The old woman asked the city for one kindness out loud and the city didn't laugh, which counts.
Lig sat down across from Breuk and said nothing. Breuk said nothing back. Their silence did the work of twenty conversations. At some point, Breuk let his head rest against the wall and closed his eyes. He didn't dream about water. He dreamed about a schoolroom where someone asked him a question and he didn't need a mouth to answer.
When he woke, he felt older by the weight of a small necklace and three names. He stood, drew breath, and handed the day to his body. It took it.
"Keep your feet," he said.
They went. And the city waited, and the shaft fell, and the clock that hadn't been a clock for anyone who mattered made a clean sound in his chest he pretended not to hear.