Rusk’s copied route ended at a black mark labeled APPROACH UNVERIFIED. Beyond it, the old iron line bent around the eastern fragment and disappeared behind a ridge of fractured stone.
Oliver set the copy against the station wall and checked the bearings against the view. The route ran along the fragment’s outer shelf, crossed a narrow service bridge, then climbed to the far signal house. The bridge was drawn as a single straight stroke. No measurements accompanied it.
Nadia leaned over the page. “Rusk didn’t see the bridge?”
“They found the record. They didn’t inspect this stretch.” Oliver folded the copy along the ridge line and tucked it into his coat. “We walk the approach before Mercy moves.”
The engine idled on the eastern ledge, its wheels locked against the rail. With the passenger carriage still supported back at the Stair of Or, there was no one to hurry them and no reason to pretend the route was better than it looked.
They took a hand line, two pitons, and a lantern from Mercy’s cab. Oliver checked the whistle at his belt, then left it there. The first signal on the copied route was a narrow hook in the margin, marked post. It could tell them where the line went. It could not tell them whether anything beyond it would hold.
The first stretch was sound. They followed the rail bed around the ridge, testing every bracket and sleeper before putting their weight on it. Wind tugged at their coats from the open side of the fragment. Far below, a slab of stone turned slowly through empty air.
At the bridge, the route changed. A section of iron decking had peeled away from its supports and hung at an angle. The remaining crossbeams still reached the other side, but the rail itself ended a few paces short of them.
Oliver crouched at the break and struck the nearest beam with a wrench. It answered with a hard ring. The next beam gave a lower note and shifted in its bracket.
“That one won’t hold both of us,” he said.
Nadia looked past the bridge. The signal house stood on the far shelf, its windows dark. A cable ran from its roofline down to a mooring ring set into the stone. It was slack, but intact.
“We can take the cable,” she said.
“After we test it.”
Oliver fixed the hand line to a bracket on their side and clipped it to his belt. He leaned on the cable in measured increments, watching the mooring ring and the bolts along the roof. Nothing moved. Nadia took the wrench and tapped the ring’s anchors. The two lower bolts held. The upper one shifted a fraction.
She stopped before it could turn further. “We tie below it.”
Next
Oliver must find out what answered from inside Mercy before the far post did, without treating the whistle’s reply as permission or turning it into a demand.
Oliver looked at the stone base. A second iron ring had been half-buried beneath loose grit. They cleared it by hand, checked its mounting, and secured the line there instead. The bridge still needed crossing, one beam at a time.
Oliver went first. He kept his weight low and tested every step with the wrench before committing. Halfway across, the tilted decking scraped against the stone ledge. The sound came through his boots. He waited until it stopped, then continued.
Nadia followed. At the last beam, her boot slipped on a strip of loose rust. She caught the hand line. Oliver braced on the far side, keeping his grip steady while she found the beam again. She crossed without using the core embedded beneath her ribs. When she reached him, she unclipped the line and checked the bridge behind them herself.
They reached the signal house by a narrow stair cut into the rock. The door had swollen against its frame, but Oliver freed it with the wrench. Inside, the room held a desk, a signal lever, and a brass bell wired to the outer post. Dust covered the desk except where someone had recently cleared a space around a small stack of ledgers.
Nadia saw the familiar handwriting first. Seris’s name stood on the inside cover of the oldest book, written in the same spare hand as the return report Rusk had shown them.
She did not open it at once.
Oliver waited beside the door. The lantern lit the page but left the far corners of the room dim. He could hear the bell wire ticking softly against the wall in the wind.
“Read it,” Nadia said. “I want to know what’s there.”
Oliver opened to the first-departure entry. The main lines were brief: engine dispatched from the lower station; destination, eastern witness post; designation, blank. Seris’s signature sat beneath them. An attached slip listed the paired whistle as a fixed-post instrument, with a note that a reply meant only that a signal had been heard.
That much matched what Rusk had already found. Oliver turned the page.
A narrow column recorded times for departure, passage, and return. Beside the first whistle test, someone had written a short note in the margin. Seris’s handwriting.
“Cab reply before post,” Oliver read.
Nadia moved closer to the desk. Her fingers hovered at the edge of the paper, careful not to cover the next line.
“Continue.”
“Fixed post answered four minutes later. Do not enter the first sound as an echo.”
Oliver read it again, slower. The station had kept its whistle silent until the engine passed. Whatever answered from the cab had come before the paired post acknowledged the signal.
There was another notation below it, added in the return column. “Engine returned under its own power. Designation entered after return: Mercy.” Seris had signed that line, too. The name had been recorded after the first run, just as the station register said. But the first-departure book made the blank at departure feel different. It had not been an oversight. The engine had left unnamed, and Seris had been watching for an answer from it.
Nadia lowered her hand to the desk. She touched the page beside Seris’s signature, not the ink itself.
“She knew something answered,” she said.
“The entry says the sound came from the cab.”
“Did she know what made it?”
Oliver had no answer. He examined the paper for another note, a name, even a scratched-out word. There was only a thin impression where the page above had been written hard enough to press through. He angled the lantern. The marks formed no readable letters.
Nadia stayed still. Oliver expected her to demand a verdict about Seris, or about him. Instead, she turned the page back to the first entry and read the blank designation field herself.
“She left it blank,” she said. “That’s what we can say.”
Oliver nodded. It was a small boundary, but it kept the record from becoming a story they had written for it.
They checked the remaining pages. Later signal tests recorded the fixed post’s replies, with the same warning beside them: heard did not mean safe passage. The first-departure register offered no explanation for the cab reply and no original name for the engine. It did establish that Seris had noticed the sound and refused to label it an echo.
Oliver copied the entry into his notebook, including the warning and the uncertain timing. Nadia watched him write. When he finished, she asked him to add the line about the designation being blank. He did.
They secured the register back inside its case and tested the house’s outer landing. The stone shelf was solid near the wall, but the last section toward the old rail had broken away. The signal house could be reached on foot; Mercy could not be brought up to it without rebuilding the approach.
On the way back, Nadia crossed the bridge first. She used the hand line as before, testing each beam with the wrench. At the far end, she secured the line around the buried ring so Oliver could follow without trusting the loose upper anchor.
Back at Mercy, Oliver set his notebook beside the copied route. The train’s brass whistle remained at his belt, its crescent mark catching the lantern light. He did not lift it.
“The first reply came from inside the engine,” Nadia said.
“According to Seris’s note.”
“And she heard it before the post did.”
Oliver shut the notebook. They had reached the far house, and the record had given them a fact neither of them could turn into an answer. Mercy had been unnamed when it left. Something within the cab had answered first.