The healer had said no canal work for two days. Marcus spent them earning his keep at Grainer's.

  He washed dishes. He hauled crates of root vegetables from a delivery cart to the kitchen, and empty bottles from the kitchen to a collection point at the end of the street where a halfling man with a hand cart picked them up every afternoon. He swept the front step twice because Grainer looked at it after the first time and said nothing, which Marcus interpreted correctly as *again*.

  The work was simple and it gave him structure, which he needed more than he wanted to admit. Structure was the scaffolding that kept his brain from cycling through the same three questions it had been circling since the elevator: where was he, how had he gotten here, and was there a way back. He didn't have answers to any of them. He had a broom and a bucket and a sequence of tasks that filled the hours, and that was enough for now.

  On the morning of the third day, Grainer set a bowl of porridge on the bar and said, "Main quay. Follow the canal east past the third lock. Look for the building with the green door."

  Marcus hadn't asked. Grainer had decided it was time.

  "Canal authority intake?"

  "They call it processing." Grainer wiped the bar with a cloth that had seen better decades. "Don't volunteer information. Answer what they ask. They'll appraise you for mana sensitivity because they appraise everyone. You'll score low. That's fine. Low scorers haul and clean. Hauling and cleaning is work."

  "I appreciate the advice."

  "It's not advice." Grainer put the cloth down. "It's the same thing I tell every broke foreigner Sable sends me. The ones who listen keep their jobs. The ones who don't come back here looking for more floor work."

  Marcus ate his porridge. It was thick, faintly sweet, cooked with something that tasted like cinnamon's less ambitious cousin. He'd stopped trying to identify the ingredients of things in this city. The food was good or it wasn't, and so far it had been good more often than not.

  He finished, washed his bowl, and left.

  The canal authority building was not difficult to find, which was itself a design choice. It sat at the eastern edge of the main quay, a broad stone structure with a green-painted door that was propped open to the morning air. The building was functional in the way that government buildings are functional everywhere: solidly built, minimally decorated, and slightly too warm inside. A painted sign above the door showed a simplified canal lock in profile with text Marcus couldn't read. Next to it, someone had nailed a smaller board with what appeared to be a list, freshly chalked. A shift schedule, maybe, or a duty roster.

  People moved in and out. Most were in work clothes, heavy canvas and leather, the kind of clothing that expected to get dirty. A few carried tools. One woman, human, had a long-handled instrument that looked like a cross between a wrench and a tuning fork, resting on her shoulder as she walked.

  Marcus went in.

  The interior was a single large room divided by a wooden counter that ran the width of the space. Behind the counter, desks. Shelves full of ledgers and rolled documents. A map of what he assumed was the canal system, large and detailed, mounted on the back wall. In front of the counter, a wooden bench along each side wall, half-occupied by people waiting. The air smelled like ink and damp stone and the faint mineral undertone that he was beginning to associate with canal water itself.

  A clerk sat behind the counter. He was an elf, which Marcus was still learning to process without staring. Tall, even seated. Fine-boned, with the sharp features and the slightly too-long proportions that marked the species. He had reading glasses, which for some reason Marcus found deeply humanizing. An elf in reading glasses, filling out paperwork. The fantasy genre had not prepared him for this.

  The elf looked up. "New intake or existing assignment?"

  "New intake."

  "Bench. I'll call you."

  Marcus sat. The bench was hard and the wait was long enough that he watched two other people get called before him. One was a human woman who seemed to know the process and moved through it quickly, handing over a document and receiving a stamped slip in return. The other was a stone person, broad and grey-skinned, who spoke so quietly that Marcus couldn't hear the exchange from across the room.

  "Next." The clerk was looking at him.

  Marcus stood at the counter. Up close, the elf was older than he'd first thought, with fine lines at the corners of his eyes and a permanent furrow between his brows that looked like it had been earned through decades of reading small print.

  "Name."

  "Marcus Cole."

  The clerk wrote it down in the script Marcus couldn't read, which meant the language he was somehow speaking had a written form he hadn't learned. Another thing to add to the list.

  "Residency status."

  "I arrived three days ago. I'm staying at Grainer's inn."

  The clerk wrote this without reaction. "Previous employment in Miravar?"

  "None."

  "Previous employment elsewhere?"

  Marcus hesitated for a fraction of a second that the clerk probably noticed. "Logistics support. Warehouse coordination. Before that, structural engineering."

  The clerk paused on the last one. Not dramatically. He just held his pen still for a beat longer than the rhythm of the form required. "Engineering experience. What kind?"

  "Civil. Bridges, municipal infrastructure. I didn't finish the certification."

  The clerk wrote something. Marcus couldn't tell if it was what he'd said or a note about what he'd said. "Mana sensitivity status?"

  "I don't know what that means."

  "Have you been appraised for ambient mana perception?"

  "No."

  The clerk set down his pen and picked up a flat stone, roughly the size of a playing card, from a tray at his elbow. It was smooth and dark, with a faint shimmer on its surface that might have been mineral or might have been something else.

  "Hold this. Both hands."

  Marcus took the stone. It was warm, warmer than the room. He held it between his palms and waited.

  Nothing happened.

  The clerk watched him for about ten seconds. "Anything?"

  "It's warm."

  "That's the stone. Anything else?"

  Marcus concentrated, which felt stupid, because he didn't know what he was concentrating on. The stone sat between his palms and was warm and smooth and that was the entirety of what it was.

  Then, faintly, at the very edge of perception, something shifted. Not a sound. Not a temperature change. More like a pressure differential he was feeling through his skin rather than against it. Like the moment just before your ears pop, but located in his hands. It was there for a second, maybe two, and then it was gone and the stone was just a stone again.

  "Maybe something," he said. "Pressure. Very faint."

  The clerk took the stone back and examined it. He held it up to the light briefly, then set it down. "Threshold-level ambient perception. Non-functional." He wrote something on the form. "That means you can sense mana exists but you can't do anything with it. You're in the majority."

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  "Is that a problem?"

  "It's a classification." The clerk's tone was perfectly neutral, the tone of a man who had explained this distinction several hundred times. "Work assignments are based on capability, not sensitivity. You'll be placed in a general maintenance crew. Physical labor, cleaning, hauling, inspection support. Twelve-hour shifts with a meal break. Pay is daily, collected at end of shift from the crew supervisor. First two weeks are provisional. Questions?"

  "Where do I go?"

  The clerk stamped the form, tore off the bottom portion, and handed it to Marcus. "East yard. Through the door at the back, follow the path along the canal. Report to whoever's running the morning crew. Give them this."

  Marcus took the slip. It was damp from the stamp. "Thank you."

  The clerk was already looking past him. "Next."

  The east yard was a wide stone apron between the canal authority building and the canal itself. It was, Marcus realized, a staging area. Tool racks along the back wall, organized by type and size. A long bench with a wooden roof over it for weather. Carts and wheelbarrows. Coils of rope hung on pegs. The canal was right there, maybe thirty feet away, its stone walls visible from this angle. Water moved below the wall line, dark and steady, carrying the mineral smell that was becoming the baseline scent of his life.

  A group of about eight people stood or sat near the bench, some with tools, some with mugs of something that steamed. They had the collective energy of people who were about to work and weren't excited about it. Morning shift. Same everywhere.

  Marcus approached. Nobody looked particularly in charge.

  "I'm looking for the crew supervisor?"

  A few heads turned. A woman at the end of the bench raised a hand, not a wave, more like an acknowledgment that she'd heard a question directed at the general area.

  "Voss isn't here yet. He's never here yet." She was short. Noticeably short, four feet and change, with brown skin and dark hair tied back and the kind of calloused hands that came from years of physical work. A halfling. She was eating a stuffed flatbread and talking at the same time and managing both better than most people managed either. "You the new intake?"

  "Marcus Cole."

  "Lira." She took the slip from him, glanced at it, and handed it back. "General maintenance, provisional. Welcome to the bottom." She said this without malice. It was just geography. "You'll be with us today. Haul crew. It's exactly what it sounds like."

  A man sitting on the bench looked up. Human, mid-forties, with the thick hands and weathered skin of someone who'd been outdoors for most of his life. He looked at Marcus the way you'd look at the new item on a familiar menu. Not hostile. Just assessing whether it was going to be worth the change. He didn't introduce himself. He went back to his mug.

  "That's Renner," Lira said, as if his silence was a form of introduction she was accustomed to translating. "He talks when he has something to say. Give it a week."

  "Or a month," said someone else. A younger voice, deliberate. Marcus turned. A stone person, late twenties probably, though he was still learning to read age on non-human faces. Broad, heavy-built, with grey-tan skin that caught the morning light with a faint mineral texture. He was leaning against the tool rack with his arms crossed, and when he spoke, he paused slightly between phrases, choosing words with the care of someone working in a second language.

  "Kael," the stone person said. He nodded. It was a compact gesture, but friendly enough.

  "Marcus."

  "I heard." A beat. "You're the second new hire this season. The last one quit after four days. The canal was too loud for him at night."

  "The canal's loud at night?"

  "Only if you're not used to it." Kael almost smiled. It was the faintest shift, more in his eyes than his mouth. "You get used to it."

  A man appeared at the edge of the yard, walking with the unhurried pace of someone who'd been making this walk for years and wasn't about to change his speed for anything. Average height, slightly soft in the middle, with the posture of a desk worker who still had a laborer's hands. He carried a clipboard.

  "That's Voss," Lira said. "Supervisor. Don't annoy him before midday. After midday, go ahead, he's already annoyed."

  Voss reached the group and looked around with an expression that suggested he was counting heads and finding the total acceptable but not inspiring. His gaze landed on Marcus.

  "Cole?"

  Marcus held up the slip. Voss took it, read it, and tucked it into his clipboard without comment.

  "You're on haul with Lira's group. She'll tell you what to do. Don't do anything she doesn't tell you to do. End of shift, come find me and I'll pay you. Questions?"

  "No."

  Voss looked at him for another second, the way a man looks at a new piece of equipment he hasn't decided to trust. Then he moved on to the rest of the crew and started assigning the day.

  The work was exactly as advertised. Hauling.

  They moved along a section of the canal, a stretch of maybe half a mile between two lock structures, and they hauled things. Debris that had accumulated in the canal access channels. Replacement stones for sections of wall that had been flagged for repair. Buckets of a grey paste that Lira called fill and that smelled like wet chalk and was apparently used to seal joints in the canal wall.

  Marcus hauled. He lifted things and moved them and set them down where he was told to set them down. The fill buckets were heavy and awkward and the replacement stones were heavier. By mid-morning his shoulders ached and his palms were raw and his healed leg was reminding him, politely but firmly, that it had recently had two gashes in it.

  He didn't complain. Complaining was for people who had options.

  Lira worked alongside the haul crew but also did something else entirely. While Marcus and two others moved materials, she walked the canal wall itself, crouching at intervals to inspect joints and mechanisms. She talked to the infrastructure the way he'd heard mechanics talk to engines. Muttering. Occasionally pressing her palm flat against the stone and holding it there, exactly like the halfling he'd watched from the bridge on his second day.

  "She's reading the flow," Kael said, appearing beside Marcus with a stone block balanced on each shoulder that would have required a hand truck for anyone else. His tone was matter-of-fact. "Halflings feel it through contact. My people feel it through weight. Same information, different sense."

  Marcus set his bucket down. "Feel what, exactly?"

  Kael considered this. "The canal is not just water. The water carries..." He paused, searching for the right word in a language that wasn't built for what he was describing. "Force. Direction. It has a rhythm. When the rhythm is right, everything moves. When it isn't, things stick. Things break."

  "Mana."

  "If you like." Kael shrugged, which with his build was a significant geological event. "That's the word they use. My mother calls it *teshaal*. The weight that moves." He set the stones down carefully, one at a time. "You were an engineer?"

  "How did you know that?"

  "Lira read your intake slip. She reads everyone's intake slip." Kael looked at him sideways. "She also told Renner, who said, and I am translating loosely, that the last thing this crew needs is another person who thinks they know better than the canal."

  "I don't know anything about this canal."

  "Good. Tell Renner that. It might save you a month."

  They went back to hauling.

  The midday meal was eaten on the canal wall, legs hanging over the edge, five feet above the waterline. A street vendor had come by with a cart, and Lira had bought flatbreads for the crew with what she called crew fund money, which appeared to be a pool that everyone contributed to and Lira managed because nobody else wanted the job.

  The flatbread was stuffed with river fish and a sharp pickled vegetable that Marcus couldn't identify but liked immediately. It was warm and oily and the fish was seasoned with something that burned at the edges of his tongue.

  "Kettle Dock style," Lira said, seeing his expression. "My mother's recipe, actually. She sold it to this vendor fifteen years ago and he's been getting it wrong ever since." She took a large bite of hers. "His version's better. Don't tell her I said that."

  Renner ate without comment. He sat slightly apart from the group, not in a way that was unfriendly, just in the way of a man who'd been eating lunch in the same approximate location for two decades and had long since settled on his preferred distance from conversation.

  Two other crew members Marcus hadn't properly met sat together. Both human, one younger, one older. They talked between themselves about something involving a boat race and a bet one of them had lost. Normal conversation. Workday conversation. The kind of talk that happened in break rooms in every warehouse Marcus had ever worked in, adjusted for a world where the warehouses ran on magic and some of your coworkers were made of stone.

  "So," Lira said, turning to Marcus. "Where are you from? And don't say 'far away.' Everyone says 'far away.' Give me a city or a region or something I can picture."

  "You wouldn't know it."

  "Try me. I've been working this canal for twelve years. I've met people from everywhere."

  "Columbus," Marcus said. "Ohio."

  Lira stared at him. She chewed. She swallowed. "You're right. I don't know it." She didn't press. He appreciated that. "Well, Columbus Ohio, you haul like you've done it before. Your hands are going to be a mess by tonight, though. Get gloves from the tool shed tomorrow. Nobody tells the new hire about the gloves. It's not hazing, it's just that nobody thinks about it."

  "I thought about it," Kael said from three feet away, not looking up from his flatbread.

  "And you didn't say anything?"

  "I wanted to see if he'd ask." Kael's voice was perfectly flat. "He didn't. That tells you something."

  "It tells me he's stubborn," Lira said.

  "Or proud," Renner said, which was the first word he'd spoken to Marcus all day. His voice was flat and unhurried, the voice of a man who had nowhere to rush to. He looked at Marcus briefly. "Or stupid. Early to say."

  "Encouraging," Marcus said.

  Something happened in Renner's face. Not a smile. More like the brief seismic event that precedes a smile in someone who hasn't committed to having one. He looked away.

  Lira grinned. It was wide and genuine and carried across the conversation like her laugh probably carried across the canal district. "He's going to be fine," she said to nobody in particular. "He's dry. I like dry."

  The afternoon was more hauling, followed by a stint helping clear a drainage channel that had silted up. Marcus spent an hour knee-deep in water that was cold and opaque and smelled like iron, shoveling muck into buckets that Kael lifted out one-handed. The work was miserable and monotonous and by the end of it Marcus's entire body felt like it had been put through a cycle in one of Brandt's industrial washing machines.

  But there was a moment, late in the afternoon, when they were moving along the canal wall toward the last work site of the shift, that Marcus noticed something.

  It was a junction. A point where a smaller feeder channel met the main canal, controlled by a valve mechanism that was partly submerged. The junction was one of a dozen they'd passed during the day, each with its own valve, each doing the same basic job of regulating flow between the feeder and the main channel.

  This one was different.

  He couldn't have said how, exactly. The water moved through it the same as the others. The valve looked similar, the stones around it looked similar. But the load on this junction felt wrong. That wasn't the right word. He didn't have the right word because he didn't have the vocabulary for a system that ran on magic. But his engineering brain, the part that mapped stress concentrations and failure patterns and couldn't turn off, was registering a discrepancy. The flow through this junction wasn't matching the flow through the others. Something was handling more load than its neighbors, or handling the same load differently, and the difference was small enough that you'd have to be comparing junctions to notice it.

  He filed it. Didn't say anything. He was new. He didn't know the canal. He didn't know what was normal and what wasn't. The discrepancy might be standard operating procedure, or a known quirk, or the junction's equivalent of a noisy pipe that everyone had stopped hearing.

  But he noticed it. And the noticing didn't stop when he looked away.

  End of shift. The crew gathered in the east yard. Voss appeared with his clipboard and a pouch of coins and paid them one by one, marking each name. The coins were small, copper-colored, and Marcus received six of them, which Lira told him was the standard daily rate for provisional haul crew.

  "It's not a lot," she said, pocketing her own pay, which was visibly more. "But it's enough for food and Grainer's rate, once you're off the work-for-lodging. Save what you can. The canal authority doesn't do advances."

  Marcus looked at the coins in his palm. Six small copper discs, stamped with a design he couldn't make out in the fading light. His first earnings in a world that had tried to drown him three days ago.

  "Thank you," he said.

  "Don't thank me, thank the canal." Lira slung her bag over her shoulder. She was already walking, already half in the next thought. "It breaks constantly. Job security."

  The crew dispersed in different directions. Renner left without saying goodbye, which Lira assured Marcus was as warm a farewell as he'd get for a while. Kael nodded to Marcus as he turned toward the lower district, that same compact gesture from the morning. The two other crew members whose names Marcus had learned were Havel and Tren. Havel had waved. Tren hadn't.

  Marcus walked back toward the inn alone. The canal was on his right, its evening rhythm different from its morning rhythm but no less constant. The locks were cycling for the night schedule, deeper and slower, and the water carried the last of the daylight in fragments of copper and blue.

  His hands hurt. His legs hurt. His shoulders were going to make their opinions known tomorrow in great detail. He had six copper coins and a job that would give him six more tomorrow, and a crew of people who were still deciding whether he was worth the effort of getting to know.

  He thought about the junction. The one that didn't match the others. He thought about the way Lira pressed her palm to the canal wall and listened to something he couldn't hear. He thought about Kael's word, *teshaal*, the weight that moves.

  He thought about none of this in any organized way. His brain just cycled through the day's inputs the way it always did, sorting, filing, connecting things that might or might not be connected. It wasn't a choice. It was just the way his head worked, and it had been working this way since long before an elevator dropped him into a world where canals ran on magic.

  Grainer was behind the bar when Marcus came in. He looked at Marcus's hands, raw and reddened, and his mud-stained trousers, and his posture, which was the posture of a man who had hauled things for twelve hours and wanted to sit down more than he wanted most things.

  Grainer set a bowl of stew on the bar.

  "Day one," Marcus said.

  "Day one," Grainer agreed.

  Marcus ate. The stew was the same as the last two nights. It was still good. Outside, the canal settled into its night rhythm, and Marcus listened to it the way you listen to a new neighbor whose routine you're just beginning to learn.

  Tomorrow he'd get gloves.