The damaged dwellings had stairs on the side of the carved rooms, cut into the stone. Each room was about the size of a Chicago apartment. Rope and chalk marked off the section with the hazard like some gritty crime scene. Two villagers chipped at loose stone along the edges, knocking away anything that still sounded hollow when their hammers kissed it. Dust hung in the air like low fog, catching in the back of his throat.

  Matas leaned his shoulder against the nearest intact pillar and made himself breathe slowly. Inspecting the surroundings, the corrosion was localized and showed no signs of spreading to the surrounding homes. His legs didn’t entirely trust the floor, but the work needed doing.

  The red-gold smear at the edge of his vision was already there, uninvited, sketching stress lines in the stone even when he tried not to look. Every time he let his focus sharpen, the band at the base of his skull answered with a slow, mean throb, like it resented being asked to carry one more load.

  “You’re sure about the next one?” one of the workers asked.

  She was short and broad, gray in her hair and dust ground into the lines of her hands. Her mallet hovered over a seam in the opposite wall.

  Matas squinted past her. The red-gold overlay crawled along the stone, tracing stress lines and load. That particular seam carried less weight than it looked like it should. A hairline crack ran through the plaster facing, but the deeper vein underneath was still dark and solid for now.

  “For now” was becoming a familiar category.

  “That one holds,” he said. “Ugly, but it holds. Two spans down—” he tapped the place with his knuckles “—don’t get any bright ideas about the stone. It's just as bad.”

  She grunted, chalked an X where he’d indicated, and turned back to her crew without argument.

  That was new.

  Yesterday, half the village had looked at him like a walking catastrophe, at best, and a structural hazard, at worst. Today, at least the people with hammers in their hands were listening when he told them where not to stand.

  Serh stood a little way down the corridor, arms folded, watching the traffic flow adjust around the roped-off zone. She caught his eye, then nodded once toward the far end.

  “Enough,” she said. “If we keep standing in the middle of the failure, it’ll decide it wants a second try.”

  “Wouldn’t want to hurt its feelings,” he said, peeling himself off the pillar.

  His knees did a slight, traitorous wobble on the first step. Nothing dramatic—just that half?beat delay between thinking move and legs actually doing it. Level Fifteen came with more horsepower. It also came with overloaded wiring.

  Serh’s gaze dipped to his feet for that one beat, then back up.

  “You’re walking better than most fifteeners,” she said.

  “Low bar,” he said. “Most fifteeners didn’t get the upgrade by falling through a dungeon.”

  Her mouth did that tiny, almost?smile, and then flattened out again.

  “Rest,” she said. “There’s another shift coming, whether you pretend you’re tired or not.”

  He didn’t argue. The pressure around his skull didn’t feel like it was going to loosen on its own, but getting horizontal for a while might at least stop it from tightening further.

  They left the repairs and a pair of wall bosses coordinating the cleanup. As they turned the corner out of the damaged gallery, a slight tremor ran up through the floor, more felt than heard. Somewhere deeper in the mountain, something big settled with a muted grind like teeth.

  The Omen overlay pulsed once, bright red along a crack he couldn’t see from here. His stomach lurched. Then the feeling passed, leaving only the steady hum in the stone under his boots.

  “See?” Serh said, without looking back. “The mountain does not wait for us.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I noticed.”

  By the time he reached his pallet, the adrenaline from the earlier ceiling collapse had burned off, leaving only bone-deep heaviness behind. He lay down in the narrow bunk, more dropping than lowering himself, and stared up at the dark.

  Sleep came in fits. Whenever he drifted under far enough that the skull?band started to loosen, some remembered impact or impact?that?hadn’t?quite?happened twitched him awake again. He could still feel the moment when his Brace had caught the worst of the ceiling slab and bled it sideways into his legs instead of into the unsuspecting heads below.

  His thighs cramped in sympathy just thinking about it.

  Still, the crash?nap beat being awake to watch the ceiling.

  At some point, the ringing in his ears faded to the background. The afterimage of the Heart’s last flare stopped painting itself across the backs of his eyelids every time he blinked. The pressure in his skull didn’t vanish, but it stopped trying to spike through his temples.

  When he surfaced again, the barracks had shifted around him.

  The light through the high slits had traded stern glare for the indirect blue-gray of later morning. People moved more quietly now, the earlier level?sick groans giving way to muttered conversations and the occasional hiss when someone misjudged what their new stats could actually do.

  He pushed himself up on his elbows. The motion sent a warning ache through his ribs and lower back—familiar, manageable. Not the hollowed-out crash from the Heart chamber.

  Better. Not good. There wasn’t a lot of room for good anymore.

  “Engineer’s awake,” someone called from near the door.

  He turned his head. Kera, the water?hauler with the bad knees that didn’t hurt this morning, was watching him over the top of an armful of folded blankets. There was no heat in the world—just acknowledgment.

  “I’m not an engineer,” he said automatically.

  She snorted.

  “You walk with the elders and tell them where not to die,” she said. “We had a word for that before your eyes went strange.”

  “Let me guess,” he said. “Idiot.”

  “Hill?hand,” she said firmly. “Water still comes up the stairs. My knees don’t scream doing it. That’s on you, whether you like it or not.”

  A few people chuckled. Even that landed lighter than it would’ve two days ago. Their eyes still lingered a fraction too long on his face, tracking the red?slit in his left pupil when the light caught it, but fewer of them flinched away afterward.

  Progress, he guessed.

  He swung his legs off the pallet. His feet hit the stone more steadily than they’d had any right to, given the last forty-eight hours. Fifteen with Endurance to match meant he could get away with less downtime than made sense for a normal human. It didn’t tell the system that he had been forgiven for stacking six levels at once.

  He tested his wrists. The left still grumbled—scar tissue and partial work?site therapy complaining about expectations—but it moved through a full range without grinding. The right rolled smooth.

  His head ached. His eyes ached. His teeth ached a little, in that weird way they got when the Heart hummed too loud under his feet.

  Functional. Not fixed. Good enough for Samhal.

  A shadow filled the barracks doorway.

  “Shift,” the junior guard said. Same one as yesterday—armor a little less crooked, eyes a little less bloodshot. “Martuk wants you in the elder hall. Bring your eyes.”

  “Those are attached,” Matas said, standing carefully. “He’ll have to take the rest of me, too.”

  The guard’s mouth twitched, then smoothed.

  “Bring the rest of you, then,” he said. “Chief’s orders.”

  That got more attention than being called Engineer had. Heads turned, tracking him as he crossed the room. Not entirely fond looks, not entirely fearful.

  Calculating. Like he was a new piece of scaffolding someone had bolted to a failing wall. Useful, until it wasn’t.

  Outside, the air had that thin, almost?clean bite that came a little after dawn. The terraces still carried the scuffed traces of last night’s disasters—fresh chalk lines, hastily stacked stone, a couple of rope?barred doorways.

  Life had flowed around the gaps. It always did.

  On one landing, two kids sparred with blunted sticks while an older hunter corrected their footing. Further along, a pair of lamplighters argued about whose turn it had been to check a particular gallery when the first cracks showed. A woman in a patched winter coat grunted as she hoisted a sack that would have dropped her two days ago, then blinked in surprise at how easily it came up now.

  Everywhere he looked, the Omen overlay traced new lines. Not just in stone—though there were plenty of those—but in the way people cut through space. Stress and load and potential failure, mapped in faint red and gold.

  He forced himself not to follow everyone.

  The elder hall door stood open when he reached it, as if the building had decided pretending privacy still existed was a waste of effort. Voices rolled out into the corridor, overlapping in a low, rough swell.

  “…telling you the north terrace sank another finger’s width—”

  “—two more lamplighters with vertigo; they keep misjudging distances—”

  “—if we close that corridor, we cut access to half the water?run—”

  The moment Matas stepped through the threshold, all that talk flattened like someone had slammed a lid on it.

  Martuk stood near the far wall, hunched over a table covered in parchment and slate. Lines and rough circles covered the surface—some obviously maps of the terraces, others more abstract, just load?bearing schematics. His ink?blackened fingers hovered over one cluster of marks like he couldn’t decide which problem to scowl at first.

  The Chief sat on his usual stone ledge, one leg braced, watching without comment. Tharel lurked near the Heart chamber entrance, arms folded. Ekher was nowhere in sight; small mercy.

  Martuk glanced up as the guard announced Matas, then gave a small, tired nod.

  “Good,” he said. “You’re vertical.”

  “Mostly,” Matas said. “Floor hasn’t decided to argue yet.”

  Martuk huffed a breath that might have been a laugh in a better world.

  “Come here,” he said, beckoning him closer. “Look.”

  Matas approached the table. The rough map resolved as he leaned over it—Samhal’s terraces sketched in thick strokes, main galleries marked with heavier lines, dots and little sunbursts noting problem spots.

  “I asked every wall boss and quartermaster for their worst cracks,” Martuk said. “This is what they gave me.”

  “That all?” Matas said.

  Martuk gave him a sideways look.

  “That they know about,” Matas amended.

  “That they chose to admit,” Martuk said. “People lie to ledgers too.”

  His finger traced a path along one of the bold lines.

  “Here,” he said. “Main gallery under the upper terraces. If that fails, half the roofs you sleep under come down with it.”

  He tapped another mark.

  “Here. Cistern underside. If that goes, we lose water and maybe everyone who happens to be above it at the time.”

  His finger moved again.

  “This corridor,” he said. “Old stone. New stress. Four separate reports of doors sticking and floors feeling ‘wrong.’ That’s the word they used. Wrong.”

  Matas followed the marks, the map aligning itself with his memory of walking the settlement. His left eye picked up faint red tracery ghosted over the parchments lines, as if the mountain itself had leaned over the drawing to add its own commentary.

  “You want to hit all three today,” he said.

  “I want to hit all three before something else decides for us,” Martuk said. “But we can’t fix everything.”

  He straightened, rubbing the side of his thumb where ink had seeped into cracked skin.

  “We start,” he said, “with what kills the most people if we leave it alone.”

  That, at least, was a language Matas understood.

  “I can walk you through them,” he said. “Tell you where the bad joints are. Maybe keep a few ceilings where they belong.”

  “That’s the idea,” Martuk said. “You’re not here to bless stone. You’re here to tell me where it refuses to earn its keep.”

  From the ledge, the Chief spoke for the first time.

  “Tharel will keep the Throat closed today,” he said. “No descents. No experiments. We treat this as a normal shift.”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  There was a faint bitterness under the last word. As if normal had become a punchline.

  “Normal,” Matas repeated. “Walk around and tell people to move their furniture off the weak spots. Got it.”

  “You’ll walk with Martuk,” the Chief said. “If he says you rest, you rest. If you say a corridor needs to close, it closes until we can shore it. No arguments.”

  “That will make me popular,” Martuk muttered.

  The Chief’s mouth twitched.

  “You’re already popular,” he said. “Just not in ways you enjoy.”

  Matas looked down at the map again. At the dots and little sunbursts and heavy strokes that represented lives he hadn’t met yet.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Martuk grabbed a stick of chalk and a half?filled slate, tucking both under one arm.

  “Walk with me, Engineer,” he said.

  The word still sat oddly on Matas’ shoulders, like a tool belt he hadn’t earned yet. But it fit better than “outsider” or architect had.

  They started with the upper residential spine.

  From the outside, it looked…peaceful.

  The main walkway cut along the mountainside, half roofed and half open to the thin light. Laundry lines strung between posts snapped and fluttered in the cold breeze. Kids wove through the press of adults with the unconscious agility of people who had grown up in tight spaces. Somewhere, someone had managed to coax a pot of something that smelled almost like coffee out of local plants.

  For a moment, if he squinted and ignored the mountain’s weight, he could almost pretend he was on a badly designed condo balcony back in Illinois. Too much load on the wrong side, railing a little too low, but people laughing anyway.

  Then the overlay bled in.

  Lines of stress traced themselves along the underside of the walkway, gathering around a series of support posts like spiderwebs around flies. One post in particular—one that sat directly under the densest knot of foot traffic—glowed faintly red at its base, where hairline fractures had already started to creep.

  “That one,” he said, nodding toward it.

  Martuk followed his gaze, then frowned. From a normal eye’s perspective, the post looked fine. A little warped, maybe, but still solid.

  “How bad?” he asked.

  Matas tilted his head, watching the phantom lines shift as people moved overhead.

  “Bad enough that if you get a dozen drunk wall?hands dancing up here, you’ll be digging them out of the lower galleries,” he said. “Not today. Not tomorrow. But soon enough.”

  Martuk’s jaw tightened.

  “We don’t dance much,” he said.

  “Good,” Matas said. “Keep it that way until someone can brace that from below and check the stone under it. In the meantime, no heavy loads over that spot.”

  Martuk beckoned to a passing foreman—a rangy woman with a scar across one cheek and a tally?stick tucked behind her ear.

  “Mark that post,” he told her. “No bulk loads, no running, no gatherings. I want planks under it by evening.”

  She followed his nod, eyed the post, then looked back at Matas.

  “You see something my eyes don’t, Engineer?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I see the part where you don’t question me about this. This is one thing I do know, so just let me answer for these decisions. If we get more time, I'll teach everyone what I look for and how I know what's the priority.

  She held his gaze for a long beat. Then she pulled the chalk from behind her ear and drew a rough circle on the flagstones above the post, bright and unmistakable.

  “Done,” she said. “I’ll move the storage racks two spans down until we can brace it.”

  It felt…good, in a way he hadn’t let himself admit in a while. Not power?good. Not “I can throw fire” good. Just the satisfaction of seeing someone take a warning seriously before gravity proved him right the hard way.

  They moved on.

  In a side alcove, two teenagers were using their new stats to compete at who could jump and grab a beam that ran overhead. Every time they landed, the Omen overlay flashed a thin bright line where the beam met the wall.

  “Hey!” Matas barked.

  Both kids froze mid-preparation for the next jump, ears flattening in almost canine reflex.

  “What?”

  “You like your legs?” he asked.

  They glanced at each other.

  “Yes?” one ventured.

  “Then find something else to pull on,” he said. “That beam’s carrying more than your neighbors home.”

  They slunk off, muttering. One of them glanced back once, as if weighing whether he could get one more jump before the different guy scolded them again.

  “If you’re going to yell at every idiot child in Samhal, we’ll be here all week,” Martuk said dryly.

  “I’m just trying not to have them land in my lap two levels down,” Matas said.

  The production aisle was louder.

  Matas hadn’t got much time to explore this area before, but tanners, blacksmiths and tailors of the village worked their jobs without sparing a glance to the passersby and nosy people who gawked at their process.

  Stalls that had been half empty two days before now had new goods spread on their boards—better spears, thicker leather, a handful of scavenged trinkets from old ventures that people had suddenly decided to air out. Level?drunk hands traced invisible stat spreads in the air as they haggled over rope and lantern oil.

  “Went from three to eight,” one man bragged, tapping his chest. “Chief’s going to have to look at me for patrol now.”

  “Everyone went from something to something,” his companion said. “Don’t get stupid.”

  “Stupid pays now,” the first man said. “You saw Kera’s knees this morning. You think that came free?”

  Matas kept walking, but the words lodged under his ribs.

  Kera caught his eye from behind a stack of water barrels and raised two fingers in a small salute. He wondered how much of her comfort had his name on the invoice.

  At the far end of the aisle, where the roof dipped lower and the stone sweated more, they reached the corridor that fed the main cistern.

  The air changed as soon as they stepped into it. Cooler. Damper. Sound warped—drips and distant sloshes echoing off rounded stone.

  “Here,” Martuk said quietly.

  The passage sloped down, the floor smoothed by generations of feet and water spills. The walls bulged in places where the rock had never quite wanted to be carved straight.

  The overlay hated it.

  Red?gold lines coiled through the stone like rust veins, gathering in a broad arc along the right?hand wall. Matas stepped closer, letting his fingertips hover just above the surface.

  “There,” he said.

  A crack no wider than a hair ran from floor to ceiling, almost invisible without the overlay’s highlight. It followed the curve of the passage, tracing where the wall wanted to peel away from the mountain’s core.

  “How bad?” Martuk asked again.

  “If this lets go,” Matas said, “you don’t get a nice neat collapse. You get a slice. Upper half of the wall shears, maybe takes the ceiling with it. Depends what’s above.”

  “What is above?” Matas asked.

  “Families,” Martuk said. “Lots of them.”

  He closed his eyes for a second, as if he could see the same map behind his lids.

  “No way to move the cistern,” he said.

  “No,” Matas said. “You brace it. You limit weight above. You make sure no one ever decides this is a good spot for a festival.”

  “Samhal’s last festival was thirty years ago,” Martuk said. “You’d think the mountain would respect that.”

  “It doesn’t,” Matas said. “It respects gravity.”

  Martuk snorted, then scribbled a tight note on his slate.

  “We’ll post restrictions,” he said. “And I’ll have Kera’s crew start shoring from the inside. Timber, if we can spare it.”

  Matas’ eyes burned by the time they came back up out of the cistern level. Not from smoke or dust. From use.

  He forced the overlay down, blinked until the red?gold lines thinned to a faint ghost in the edges of his sight. Not gone—never gone now—just quieter. He’d learned the hard way that if he let it run full strength all day, sooner or later his depth perception went sideways and stairs stopped being polite about which way was down.

  The overlay hadn’t shut up all morning. Every time he tried to let his focus soften, it would throw another faint annotation across his vision—an edge heavier than it should be, a joint that wanted to shift, a crack that hadn’t quite admitted it was a crack yet.

  He found himself counting the number of times he blinked in a stretch of hallway, just to make sure up and down still agreed on terms.

  By the time they reached the third problem corridor—the one with “wrong” floors—he was starting to taste copper again.

  “What do you think?” Martuk asked, as they stepped onto the first flagged stone.

  “Feels like bad,” Matas said.

  Martuk frowned.

  “You know it’s wrong as soon as you step out, but you can’t point at any single board and say, ‘that one,’” Matas said. “Too many small sins, noting glaring.”

  Holding the pattern in his sight made his skull feel two sizes too small. No single crack to pin and be done with—just a net of quiet failures, tugging at the band behind his eyes with every step. If the cistern wall had been a single bad beam, this whole corridor was a dozen cheap fasteners nobody had bothered to log.

  The overlay agreed. No single crack screamed imminent. A dozen small lines threaded underfoot instead, weaving a web from wall to wall.

  “Spread weight thin,” he said. “No carts. No large groups. If you can reroute traffic, do it. If not, make sure everyone knows not to run.”

  Martuk nodded slowly.

  “And repairs?”

  “You don’t repair this,” Matas said. “You replace it, or you accept that one day it’s going to leave a hole and plan your response.”

  “Honest,” Martuk said.

  “Structural,” Matas said.

  They were halfway down the corridor when the mountain made its own point.

  It started as a shift in the overlay—lines tightening, brightening for no reason he could see. The hairs on his arms stood up. The band at the base of his skull yanked twice, hard.

  “Stop,” he said.

  Martuk froze mid?step at the tone, one foot hovering over a particular slab.

  “What—”

  The floor six paces ahead let out a quiet, treacherous crack.

  There was no dramatic warning. No roar. Just a sudden, ugly cough of dust as one corner of a flagstone dropped half a handspan, wrenching its neighbors with it.

  A boy carrying a crate of lamp oil was walking straight toward it.

  “Hey!” Matas shouted.

  The boy looked up, blinked, didn’t slow.

  Matas didn’t think. Thinking took too long.

  He lunged.

  Every complaint his legs had been saving up for the day hit at once. His hangover flared white?hot. His vision doubled. But momentum was momentum, and roofing experience counted for something.

  He slammed into the boy from the side, shoulder first, knocking him into Martuk. The crate wobbled, slipped, but Martuk’s ink?stained hands snapped out and caught it with a curse.

  The sagging flagstone gave way completely under the space where the boy’s foot would have been. It dropped with a tooth?gritting crunch, taking a chunk of its neighbor and part of the underlying fill with it. Dust puffed up in a sickly gray bloom.

  Matas hit the opposite wall hard enough that his teeth clacked together. For a moment, everything was sound and impact and the metallic taste of his own breath.

  Then the world resolved back into double?exposed images—one clean, one overlaid with red?gold lines. They fought for primacy until he closed one eye and forced his focus to settle.

  His legs were not interested in cooperating. They shook under him like overstressed trusses after a windstorm.

  “Idiot,” Martuk said sharply.

  Matas wasn’t sure whether he meant the boy, the floor, or him.

  Probably all three.

  The boy stared at the new hole, eyes wide, crate still pressed against Martuk’s chest.

  “I—” he started.

  “Shut up,” Martuk said. “Breathe.”

  He did.

  Matas let himself slide down the wall until he was sitting. The stone under his palms felt like it was humming, the vibration traveling up his arms.

  Brace hadn’t even formally fired this time. His body just remembered too many falls.

  “You all right?” Martuk asked, not looking away from the fractured floor.

  “Define all right,” Matas said through his teeth.

  “Not dead,” Martuk said.

  “Then yeah,” Matas said. “I’m fine.”

  He wasn’t. His calves trembled in tiny, involuntary spasms. His skull felt three sizes too small. But the boy was breathing and unbroken and the corridor hadn’t decided to turn the partial failure into a full?on landslide.

  He’d take it.

  Workers arrived within moments, drawn by the noise. The foreman from the residential spine swore under her breath when she saw the gap.

  “I told you this corridor was wrong,” she said.

  “You didn’t tell me it was about to drop children,” Martuk said, but the edge in his voice was dulled by relief.

  “Wasn’t about to,” Matas said, forcing himself upright again. “It did. You just got lucky about who was standing there.”

  The boy flinched.

  Matas regretted the phrasing immediately.

  “Lucky,” Martuk agreed. “Because someone was watching.”

  He clapped a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  “Take that crate to the lamproom,” he said. “Then go tell your mother you almost put a hole in my ledger.”

  The boy nodded, face pale, and scuttled away.

  Watching the boy scuttle away, Matas smirked. The kid would definitely tell his mother. And Martuk had just signed his punishment letter.

  “Better that then a pyre,” Martuk replied, nodding at the broken stretch. “Barricades at both ends. No through?traffic until we can plate it properly, and even then, only if we have no better options.”

  “People will complain,” she said.

  “Good,” he said. “Means they’re alive to do it.”

  She snorted and started barking orders.

  Martuk turned back to Matas.

  “You felt that coming,” he said.

  “Something like that,” Matas said. “Overlay got loud. Skull decided to try out a new pressure setting.”

  “You’re shaking,” Martuk observed.

  “New feature,” Matas said. “Try not to rate the service.”

  Martuk’s mouth twitched.

  “Sit down,” he said. “For more than three breaths this time. I’ll tell them it’s orders if that helps.”

  “You’re not a doctor,” Matas said, but he let his back hit the wall again.

  “No,” Martuk said. “Worse. I’m the one who has to write the casualty reports.”

  They took a slower path back up toward the main terraces after that.

  Word traveled faster than they did.

  By the time they passed through the market again, whispers chased them.

  “He pulled Jeren’s boy out of a hole.”

  “Not Jeren’s. Tel’s.”

  “Same difference. Kid’s still got both legs because of him.”

  “Or because the floor chose today to give way. Don’t hang all your stories on strange eyes.”

  Matas pretended not to hear, the names meant nothings to him. The skull?band had settled back into its usual steady constriction, but a ghost of the earlier spike lingered behind his left eye.

  On one of the upper walkways, a group of hunters leaned against the railing, watching the traffic below. New armor. New confidence. One of them—young, hair still more fluff than tie—pushed off the rail as Martuk and Matas passed.

  “Elder,” he called. “Snake.”

  It took half a heartbeat to realize the second word was meant for him. Snake. Not a title anyone had asked his opinion on—just what stuck after the basin, after the Heart had decided his bad?luck eyes made a good vent.

  Martuk’s shoulders tensed infinitesimally.

  “Hunter,” he said.

  “We were talking,” the young man said. “About the Trial.”

  “Of course you were,” Martuk said.

  “If it can do what it did,” the hunter went on, undeterred, “maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to close the Throat. A few more runs, careful ones—”

  “No,” Martuk said.

  The word landed like a hammer on a nailhead.

  “We don’t know what it costs yet,” he said. “Except in bodies.”

  “But we saw the numbers,” the hunter protested. “Everyone did. One run like that every few months, and Samhal could—”

  “Could what?” Martuk asked. “Stand taller on a mountain that’s already sliding out from under us?”

  The hunter flushed.

  Matas stayed quiet. This wasn’t his argument. Not yet. He’d only end up comparing the Throat to a rotten roofbeam again, and he wasn’t sure the analogy would help.

  “Go,” Martuk said, jerking his chin toward the practice yard. “If you want to thank anyone for your new strength, put it into wall duty, not into fantasies.”

  The hunter opened his mouth, saw the look in Martuk’s eyes, and thought better of it.

  As they walked on, Martuk let out a thin breath.

  “It will not hold,” he said quietly. “Not that argument. Not for long.”

  “They’re already doing the math,” Matas said. “Rust runs took whole crews for a sliver. One Omen run took four people and leveled a village. That’s…efficient, from the wrong angle.”

  “Efficient is one word,” Martuk said. “Mad is another.”

  The lines at the corners of Martuk’s eyes looked deeper in the thin light. He wasn’t just arguing with one overeager hunter; he was bracing against a tide that had already started to rise in the yard, in the barracks, in every whispered “what if we went again?” that thought new levels meant they were owed more tries.

  They ended the day on a small maintenance landing cut into the side of the mountain, halfway between the lower terraces and the watch?paths above. From here, Matas could see more of Samhal at once than he ever had—roofs stepping down in uneven tiers, smoke venting in narrow plumes, the faint shimmer where the Heart’s light leaked through stone.

  It looked…fragile.

  Not in the fairy?tale sense. In the way of a job site where someone had added one cost?saving measure too many. Too much load on one side, not enough brace on the other, compromises hiding in every join.

  Martuk leaned against the railing, slate in hand.

  “We marked six critical points today,” he said. “Closed two corridors. Ordered braces for three supports. Found one we can’t fix with what we have.”

  He tapped the last note with the end of his chalk.

  “That one keeps me awake,” he said. “More than the others.”

  “Cistern wall?” Matas guessed.

  Martuk nodded.

  “If something big hits us,” he said, “water will be as deadly as stone.”

  “Good news is, you’re unlikely to get bored,” Matas said.

  “That is not the comfort you think it is,” Martuk said.

  Matas watched a pair of children chase each other along a safe, well?braced stretch of terrace two levels down. One tripped, laughed, scrambled back up. The overlay stayed quiet. For now.

  “Back home,” he said, “I’d get called in to look at a roof after a bad storm. Sometimes you could patch it. Sometimes you’d tell the owner, ‘You can keep living under this, or you can start moving your stuff out. You don’t get both.’”

  “And what did they usually choose?” Martuk asked.

  “Lie about how much weight they were storing in the attic,” Matas said. “Hope the next storm wasn’t the one that cashed the check.”

  Martuk made a low sound in his throat.

  “People everywhere,” he said, “like to believe the beam will hold a little longer.”

  “Until it doesn’t,” Matas said.

  They stood in silence for a while.

  The mountain breathed under them. Stone creaked, subtle and constant. Somewhere far off, a rockfall rattled down a distant slope, too faint to do more than prick at the edge of his awareness.

  The mailbox flag in the corner of his vision pulsed once.

  He almost ignored it. He was tired of reading lines that never came with solutions.

  Habit—and a lifetime of not leaving messages unopened—won.

  The flag unfolded without drama.

  Behavioral data: settlement structural adjustments logged.

  Probability variance: upward drift.

  External events: active.

  No suggestions. No warnings. Just bookkeeping.

  He thought of the half?collapsed flagstone, the crack in the cistern wall, the fresh hairlines he’d seen today that hadn’t been there yesterday. None of them big enough, on their own, to count as a story. Together, they felt like the system quietly clearing its throat before the main act.

  “Anything useful?” Martuk asked, not looking at him.

  “System says the village is still standing,” Matas said. “And that the odds are getting worse.”

  Martuk snorted.

  “I could have told you that without strange eyes,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Matas said. “But now you have it in writing.”

  Later, lying back on his pallet with the stone’s hum in his bones and the skull?band digging in just deep enough to remind him it wasn’t going anywhere, he realized something that should have been obvious.

  Today had been a good day.

  No one had died. No terraces had fallen. They’d closed off problems before they became disasters and written orders that might actually keep a few more people from being under the wrong ceiling at the wrong time.

  It still felt like he’d spent twelve hours bracing a building he knew, in his bones, was going to fail.

  Soon? Maybe not.

  Eventually? Absolutely.

  The system, at least, seemed confident about that much.

  And tomorrow, they were going to wake up and pretend “normal shift” still meant anything.