Three Minutes

The cathedral district map-room is two corridors east of where they sleep. She is there at 06:55 with a slate-map Severa handed her at breakfast, a pencil-case she will not put down, and the resolved instruction read the cistern-overlay before you read anything else.

The cistern-overlay is the part of the map that tells her which streets sit above water and which sit above stone. The reading is fast — she has been a surveyor since she was nineteen and a competent one since she was twenty-three — but the answer takes longer than she expected. The cistern under Sebastopyr is bigger than she had assumed at breakfast. The cistern runs under more of the cathedral district than the buildings sitting on top of it appear to be aware of.

She marks the cisterns on the slate-map in pencil. She marks the streets that sit above stone in a different mark. She marks the alleys that are rapid-advance routes for any breach exploit in a third mark.

She is finishing the third mark when the work-horn lands.

⟦ HORN · WORK ⟧

She is 600 meters from the east curtain. The map shows her exactly where she is. The map also shows her, in the same glance, that the alley sixty paces ahead of her is the fastest path from the breach in the east gate to the cathedral cloister where the cohort is housed and the hospital is operating.

She has 60 seconds to reroute before stepping into a street that will be in use.

She does not step into it.

She turns left, toward the second junction, where a city watchman is standing with his shoulder against a wall and his eyes on the lane. He has a half-beard and the kind of patience that comes from having stood at the same junction for ten years.

She says: The alley is the breach path.

He looks at her for one second. He sees the slate-map. He nods. He starts shouting orders down the lane. He turns back to her and asks: How many minutes?

She does not say ten. She does not say five. She says, plainly:

Under ten minutes. Plan for five.

He nods again. He runs.

⟦ FIRST SURVEY HONORED BY ARMED MEN · LOGGED ⟧
⟦ XP +30 ⟧

She follows him to the second junction. The watchman is older than she is by twenty years and he does not ask her to keep up; he assumes she will. She does. They reach the junction in forty seconds and she has the slate-map open before her hands stop moving. The lane is filling with watchmen in shields. There are two carts already being pushed into position at the alley mouth. There is a lantern-rig being tied to a tripwire at the carts' base.

The watchman turns to her.

You stay here, you can run to the wall, or you can come with me to the second junction where I lose visibility on the breach.

He is not commanding her. He is asking her to choose a useful next station.

She makes the choice without performing it.

Second junction.

She walks with him. They reach the second junction in ninety seconds. He puts his shoulder against the next wall. She opens the slate-map. The breach window has tightened. The wall is taking a strike Yuki cannot see and the masonry above the gate is doing the thing masonry does when it has been hit too many times. She reads the seam at the gate. She counts the breach window down.

Three minutes.

The watchman does not look at her. He says, into the lane behind him, three minutes. The lane behind him understands.

The breach comes through at the 2:47 mark.

Six men come through.

They hit the carts. The tripwire releases the lantern-rig. The lantern-rig goes off at the alley's choke and the alley fills with smoke and flame in a way that does not kill the six men but stops them from being able to see what they are running into. The watchmen with the shields are at the alley's mouth in the smoke before the six men can recover.

She does not see the killing.

She is reading the next map.

She is marking a route for any future breach window so the next person standing in this junction with a slate does not need to read it.

⟦ SIX HOSTILE COMBATANTS · ALLEY COLLAPSE · ZERO REACHED THE CATHEDRAL ⟧
⟦ FRIENDLY CASUALTIES IN ALLEY · 0 ⟧
⟦ YUKI'S RECOMMENDATION HONORED · SAVED FORWARD ⟧

⟦ LEVEL UP TRIGGER · SURVEYOR 1 → 2 ⟧
⟦ HP MAX +8 (rolled honestly) · 8 → 16 ⟧
⟦ UNLOCKED · MAP READ 1 — Yuki can hold three sightlines simultaneously without instrument; slate-maps annotated by her hand at no action cost ⟧

By 14:00 she has the cathedral district slate-map annotated in her own hand. The pencil-case has been on the table to her left for six hours. She has not opened it.

She opens it at 14:14.

The slip is folded the way she folded it when she was twenty-six. The handwriting on it has not changed in nine years. 気をつけて — be careful — in the only person's hand that has written for her in that script for a third of her life.

She unfolds the slip. She reads it. She does not cry — she has not cried in front of work-papers in eleven years; the discipline is older than the partner — but the cold-load tracker in her chest does the thing it has been refusing to do since the morning the rain came with her into the cathedral. It softens.

She folds the slip back. She puts it in the pencil-case. She puts the pencil-case in her pocket. The slip stays with her for the rest of the day. The cathedral district map stays on the table.

She has not said his name yet. She will not, for a while. Saying it now would put a cost on the people she is trying to keep alive, and the saying can wait.

She goes back to the map.

She finishes the cathedral district by 17:00. She begins the eastern cloister overlay at 17:14. She works until Severa finds her at 18:30 and says supper.

She stands up. Her wrists are warm. Her hands are steady. The wet outer layer from the morning of arrival is dry now and folded on her bed. The cold-load tracker reads resolved for the first time since 04:13 on Day 1.

⟦ COLD-LOAD · RESOLVED · the slip read for the first time since arrival is part of the cause ⟧
⟦ SLATE-MAP · ANNOTATED BY HAND · cathedral district fully marked, eastern cloister overlay begun ⟧

At supper she ate one piece of bread before she answered Mnehmos. She wanted her hands to be steady. They were.

Yes. Assign me survey work.

Two words and a third. The third was for the chain of command. The cost was real. The number lined up.

Mnehmos assigned her the cathedral district at first light. The daylight survey of the wall approach, the hospital approaches, and any route her notes marked uncertain under stress. Bring me a map the chain can assign from.

She nodded.

She did not need to say anything else.

She finished her bread.

⟦ FORMAL YES AT SUPPER · ASSIGNED CATHEDRAL DISTRICT MORNING SURVEY ⟧
⟦ YUKI · L2 · HP 16/16 · XP 235/900 ⟧