For three breaths, no one moved except the workshop.
Copper shutters withdrew from the walls. Inspection lamps descended on jointed arms, their blue flames narrow enough to cut shadows into strips. The central rail divided around Garran's boots and exposed a trough lined with black glass. At its far end waited a chair built for a man who had not yet learned what had been done to him.
It had sixty-four braces.
One stood open.
Lark stepped between Garran and the chair. She had no spear. Foundry Nine had taken it at the pressure lock and issued a receipt that valued the weapon at less than its blade wrapping. She held the receipt now, folded lengthwise into a stiff edge.
"Define installed," she said.
Mara looked past her. "Attached, seated, and made capable of receiving a lawful foundation."
"Capable is not the same as used."
"No."
"Did you install the seals?"
"No."
"Did Nell Vale provide them?"
Mara's brass fingers stopped against the gauge roll.
"That question is outside acceptance tolerance."
Lark took one step closer. "Everything inside his bones is inside acceptance tolerance."
A blue lamp tilted toward Garran. Heat passed over his face without warming it. Under the bandages, the bones of his right hand began to hum in six incompatible pitches.
Garran counted the lamp arms. Eight above. Four at shoulder height. Two low enough to take a knee. The chair restraints were old leather over steel, maintained weekly and replaced nowhere.
"The inspection has already started," he said.
Mara glanced at him then, properly. Her eyes were a darker brown than Tamsin's and steadier in a way that suggested practice rather than nature.
"Yes."
"Can it be stopped?"
"Not without rejecting the work."
"Cost?"
"The foundry retains the commission, the commissioned subject, and all attached delivery property until defects are cured."
"So the boat, me, and whichever unfortunate person the building defines as attached."
"Correct."
Tamsin leaned around Garran to inspect the chair. "That left clavicle brace is three degrees out."
Mara did not look. "Two and seven-tenths. The subject healed badly after Blackwake."
"He healed crooked because no one reset it."
"That is what badly means."
Tamsin's jaw worked once. She took a small driver from her sleeve and drove it hard into the rail junction beside her boot.
The rails tried to shift. The driver bent. The rails stopped.
"Temporary," Mara said.
"So are arteries. People still object when you cut them."
The inspection lamps rotated toward the black-glass trough. Lettering surfaced beneath it in lines of white fire.
WORK ORDER ZERO.
PREPARATION: COMPLETE.
HOUSINGS INSTALLED: SIXTY-THREE.
HOUSINGS PRESENT: SIXTY-FOUR.
Garran read the last line twice.
Lark read it once. "Present where?"
The workshop answered by sending one blue lamp toward Mara Reed.
She did not step back.
The light passed over her brass hand, her wrist, and the leather cuff hiding the join. It climbed her arm and stopped at the center of her chest.
The gauge roll in her hand clicked open by itself. Thin leaves of tempered brass spread between her fingers, each engraved with calibration marks. On the final leaf, beneath old brown stains, Garran saw the same commission number that had been written on the housings inside his bones.
Tamsin pulled the driver free of the rail.
"No," she said.
Mara's voice remained level. "The foundry roof failed during installation. A crucible line crossed the evacuation road. I had one intact housing and damage to the breastbone, heart sheath, and left lung."
"No."
"I used what was available."
"You used his."
"Yes."
The open brace on the chair unlocked.
Something beneath Mara's work coat answered with a hard metallic knock.
Garran had heard bolts shear inside hulls. The first sound was never the dangerous one. The dangerous sound came after, when the load discovered it had fewer places to go.
Mara's shoulders drew back. A second knock struck under her breastbone.
Tamsin crossed the distance between them fast enough to make the lamp arms recoil. She put both hands against her mother's coat, one above the heart and one below, feeling through canvas and wool.
"You've got a load ring in there."
"Yes."
"Tied to what?"
"Everything essential."
"Specificity is free. Try it."
"Pericardium. Three ribs. Pulmonary brace. The upper left vessel arch."
Tamsin took her hands away. Grease from her palms marked the coat in two dark prints.
The workshop spoke from grilles in the ceiling.
"Commissioned component located. Restoring assembly position."
The rails moved.
Tamsin's bent driver snapped. Garran caught her by the back of her belt before the opening junction took her ankle. Lark caught his bandaged hand before he used it against the chair.
Her grip was precise, thumb clear of the split knuckles. She had rewrapped that hand before dawn, after sharpening three borrowed chisels and leaving a bowl of fish broth beside him without comment. The bandage had not slipped once despite heat, climbing, or the foundry trying to itemize him.
He could not stop noticing that.
"Do not invoke anything," she said.
"Wasn't planning to."
"Your bones disagree."
White lines shone through the bandage.
The black-glass trough pulled at him. Not his clothes. Not his skin. The pressure reached through both and found the sixty-three finished shapes seated along his skeleton. Each held. The sixty-fourth claim scraped loose among them, raw and without a harbor.
Across the workshop, Mara staggered one pace.
The pull changed direction.
Garran understood the mechanism then. The chair was not trying to bring Mara to him. It was trying to bring the missing housing back to its planned location, with or without the material around it.
Estimated loss: one sternum, one heart sheath, one lung brace, and the customer.
"Mara," he said. "How long if it extracts?"
"Eight seconds."
"Until it stops?"
"Until I do."
Tamsin struck the nearest lamp arm with the heel of her hand. It folded, recovered, and caught her wrist in a copper clamp.
Garran moved before Lark could forbid it. He drove his shoulder under the arm's elbow joint and lifted. The joint was designed to resist downward load. It had no opinion about a retired harbor soldier putting one hundred eighty pounds through its service gap.
The pin tore free.
Blue flame crossed Garran's sleeve. Lark smothered it with the folded receipt, slapped the burning paper away, and used the freed clamp key to release Tamsin.
"Seven," Mara said.
The metal knock inside her was coming faster.
Tamsin seized the gauge roll from her mother's brass hand.
Mara caught the other end.
"Do not."
It was the first unmeasured thing she had said.
Tamsin looked down at their hands on the roll. Hers were small, scarred, and black at the nails. Mara's were made of fitted brass plates with narrow channels where sensation wire had once been expensive.
"This is your master credential," Tamsin said.
"And your proof of succession."
"You don't get to leave me a corpse and come back for the inheritance."
"Break that roll and Foundry Nine will recognize neither of us as master artificer. Every commission here will pass to external arbitration."
"Nine hundred sixty-three of them. I counted."
"The successor's claim is the only claim you possess that cannot be revoked by your birth island."
Tamsin's eyes flicked once toward Practical Mercy's berth beyond the workshop walls. Her registered keel governor was already entered as foundry capital. Her one-fifth claim in the boat had gone with it. Garran had no replacement share to give her, only figures in a ledger that disliked him personally.
"Six," Mara said, though her lips had gone pale.
Lark crouched at the base of the chair, examining its maker's plate. "The inspection derives authority from the active master's calibration. Destroying the roll may halt restoration. It may also place the foundry into custodial seizure."
"Probability?" Garran asked.
"Unpriced."
"That's examiner for bad."
"It is examiner for no one has done anything this stupid in the surviving records."
Master Harlan would have called that an invitation and borrowed money against it.
The chair's open brace drew back with a crack. Mara folded around the sound in her chest. Tamsin held the roll between both hands now, but she was looking at Garran.
He knew that look. Employees used it when the owner had made the damage their choice by refusing to give an order.
He took blame faster than help. That did not make the arithmetic less plain.
"Your credential," he said. "Your decision."
Tamsin bared her teeth. "Useless answer."
"Accurate one."
"Five," Mara breathed.
Tamsin braced the gauge roll across her knee.
Mara released it.
The tempered brass resisted. Tamsin shifted her grip by half an inch, found the gap between the calibration leaves, and bent again. The roll broke with a noise no louder than a dry stick.
Every lamp in the workshop went out.
The pull vanished.
Garran hit the rail on one knee. Lark kept hold of his wrist and lowered his hand instead of letting the bandaged knuckles strike iron. In the dark, one of her fingers checked his pulse. Efficient. Unasked. He fixed his attention on the measurement of that pressure because the alternative was the sound Tamsin made when she caught her mother.
Emergency lamps woke red along the floor.
Mara lay against Tamsin's shoulder, still breathing. The broken halves of the gauge roll rested on either side of them. Its engraved leaves had sprung loose and scattered across the rails like metal feathers.
The ceiling grilles crackled.
"Active master credential destroyed. Acceptance inspection suspended. Successor certification void. All resident commissions transferred to charter custody pending appointment of an external master."
Tamsin kept two fingers at Mara's throat. "Good pulse. Irregular, but you built it that way."
Mara opened her eyes.
"I built it to last fourteen years," she said.
"Then you're overdue for maintenance."
The words came sharp. Tamsin's hands did not. She unfastened Mara's coat and eased the cloth away from the swelling over her breastbone without tugging once.
Above them, machinery began turning toward the signal mast.
Lark stood. "Charter custody requires notice to all registered interested parties."
Garran listened to relays close through the walls, one after another, climbing toward the roof.
"Including the battlefield surety," he said.
"Yes."
The impounded acceptance notice slid from its locked channel. A transmission hammer rose.
Tamsin looked at the broken credential in her hand.
Then Foundry Nine struck Hollis Mere's address into the light.