The City of Borrowed Hands

Chapter One: Reading Walls

The room at the end of Kettle Lane had about three hours left in it.

Sanja Zennaro knew this the way other people knew rain was coming. She stood in the doorway with her hand flat against the frame and let the wall tell her. Under her palm the coral-cement was cool and slightly tacky, like the skin of a fruit going soft. When she pulled her hand away, four faint prints stayed behind, then slowly filled in.

Sweating. Not the honest damp of a Flats winter, which beaded and ran and dried. This was the wall giving itself up: the lattice inside it letting go, grain by grain, releasing the water it had held locked for however many years since somebody's hands had drawn the pattern into it.

She licked her finger and touched the wall and licked again. Sweet-salt, with a chalky back-taste that coated her teeth. Three hours. Maybe four if the cold held.

"Well?" Vito hissed from the lane. He had the barrow wedged against a mooring post, and he was doing the thing he did with his shoulders when he was frightened, hunching them up around his ears like a heron.

"Three," said Sanja.

"You said that about the bath-house and we nearly went down with it."

"The bath-house had a cistern on the roof. That's not the wall's fault." She stepped inside.

The family had gone two days ago, which was the whole reason they were here. In the Flats, when a room started to sweat, people took their bedding and their pots and their children and left the rest, because the rest was fixed — tempered in, part of the fabric — and prising fixtures out of a dying wall was work for someone who did not much mind being inside a dying wall.

That was Sanja's trade. She was eleven, small for it, and very good.

She went through the room in the order she always went: high things first, because high things fell, then hinges, then anything brass. The window-catch came away with two twists of the little pry-bar Vito had made her out of a boat-hook. The hinge plates were seized with salt and she had to work them, singing under her breath to keep her hands even. A light-tube, still half-charged, its glow the colour of watered milk. A sill of good hard temper, forty years old at least, which she cut free with a wire saw in a shower of grit that stung her eyes.

Under the sill the wall had gone the colour of a fish's belly.

Sanja stopped and watched it for a moment, because it was worth watching, in the way a fire is worth watching. Grown matter did not crack when it failed. It slumped. The lattice inside gave up its shape and the whole business relaxed back into what it had been before any hand touched it: grey slurry, seawater and mineral and nothing, sagging out of its own edges like fat off a bone.

Corabel had not been built. Everyone in the Flats knew that, and said it with a certain amount of pride and a certain amount of grievance. Two hundred years ago the salt flats had been drowning and somebody had brought assembler vats out on barges and fed them seawater, and out of the vats had come a slurry that could be poured and pressed and made to hold — terrace on terrace, tier on tier, a city rising out of the shallows like something growing. The guild gardens of the Crown up at the top, where the air smelled of citrus. The Shelf below it, all foundries and vat-houses and the long ribbed sheds of the Concerns. And down here, the Flats, where the walls were thin as pastry and the water was always eight inches from the doorsill.

Grown matter had exactly one flaw, and the flaw was the reason Sanja ate.

No assembler could lay a lattice that held. Nobody knew why, or nobody who knew why would say. The slurry had to be seeded by a living hand, held in a state of unbroken attention, drawing the pattern through the wet matter while it set. That was tempering. A good temperer's work stood for a hundred years and rang like stone. A bad temperer's work sweated, slumped, and unset.

In the Flats, doorframes were re-tempered every second winter. Children learned to read a wall's sweat the way children elsewhere learned weather.

"Sanja!"

"Coming."

She had one more thing to get, and she got it last on purpose. In the corner of the room there was a shrine niche, a little arched hollow that the original temperer had drawn in freehand — you could see where the hand had gone, a curl in the grain like a thumbprint in dough. Somebody had kept a bowl of dried lagoon-flowers there and a shell and a paper picture of a woman with a stern flat face.

Sanja took the shell, which was worth a half-token, and left the picture, and moved the bowl of flowers out into the middle of the floor where whoever came back would see it before the floor gave. That was all. She was not sentimental. She just did not like the thought of a face going grey under a ceiling.

Outside, the light was low and yellow and the lane smelled of frying and pitch. Vito loaded the barrow, muttering over each piece, already selling it in his head. He was seventeen and had their mother's long jaw and none of her patience. Fencing was his trade and he was worse at it than he thought.

"Sill's good," he said, tapping it. "Old temper. Listen to that." He tapped again and it gave a clean dull note, no rattle. "Somebody's grandmother made this."

"Somebody's grandmother made everything down here," said Sanja.

They were four lanes away when the room went. They heard it rather than saw it: a long soft sound, like a wet sheet dropped from a height, and then the shouting.

Vito swore and kept walking. Sanja looked back once. Above the rooflines, where the terrace edge had been, there was a new shape in the skyline, a bite taken out.

"Three hours," Vito said. "You said three hours."

"It was cold."

"It was two."

"It was two," Sanja admitted.

They sold the brass to a man on Rope Street who cheated them by about a fifth, and the sill to a builder who cheated them by more but paid in food tokens, which were harder to steal. Then they went home, which was one room and a hammock and a stove, on the third tier of a stack called the Beehive because of the noise.

While Vito cooked, Sanja sat with her back against the wall by the stove and felt it with her shoulder blades. This was a habit and a superstition and also simply sensible. Their own wall had a hairline in the temper about a metre up, a wandering seam where somebody had let their attention slip while laying it, decades ago, and forked the lattice. Forks were faults. This one had held so far.

"It's fine," she said.

"I didn't ask."

"You were about to."

Vito scraped fish skin off the pan. Steam went up and hung under the ceiling. "Man at the yard says the Concerns are hiring temper crews for the seawall work. Says they're paying in seasons now, not by the job. Renewal contracts."

"Renewal on what?"

"Everything. That's the point. You buy the wall and then you buy keeping the wall." He set a bowl down beside her. "Eat."

Sanja ate. She was thinking about the curl in the grain of the shrine niche, the little turn where a hand had gone around a corner and left a mark that was not a mistake exactly, more like a way of speaking. Every temperer had one. You could learn to see them. In the Flats, that was the closest thing to a signature anybody left behind.

She did not know it then, but nine days later she would be inside a Solmaris trace-clinic with the ceiling half-down and her pry-bar in her fist, and a woman in a grey coat would put a hand on her shoulder and say, not unkindly, *this one's small, she'll do*, and everything about Sanja Zennaro's hands would stop being hers.

For now she finished her fish, and licked the bowl, and slept with the sound of eleven families around her, and dreamed of nothing at all, which was the last time she would be able to say that.