Monday was normal.

  Marcus showed up at the east yard at five-thirty for his expanded route. The assignment board had his name in Voss's careful block letters, the same slot, the same stations, the same duties he'd been performing for three weeks. His tool bag was where he'd left it on Friday, hanging on the third hook from the door in the equipment room, between Renner's bag, which was older and heavier and organized with the grim precision of a man who had been packing the same tools for twenty years, and Pell's bag, which looked like it had been packed by a person who believed in optimism more than he believed in inventory.

  The morning crew was filtering in. Pell was explaining something about barometric pressure and hat selection to Kael, who was eating flatbread and providing the conversation with the service of his attention without actually participating in it. Renner was checking valve wrenches with the methodical focus of a man who had opinions about threads. Sera was reading the bulletin board and making notes on a piece of paper she kept in her pocket, because Sera was in the phase of her canal career where she still believed that writing things down would make them matter.

  Marcus collected his bag and his log board and his assignment slip and walked to the junction checkpoint. Orna was there, the morning dispatcher, stamping slips with the flat efficiency that was either her personality or her professional style, the distinction being academic because she'd been doing this long enough for the two to merge. She stamped his slip. She said "Morning." She met his eyes.

  Normal. Everything was normal.

  He ran his route. Sixteen stations. The readings were clean. The flow was stable. Station Twelve's junction array hummed at its proper frequency, the pitched-down steady tone of a system working within capacity, and if there was a residual signature from Wednesday night's intervention it was buried so thoroughly beneath the baseline that Marcus himself couldn't distinguish it from the ambient. The conduit he'd opened had closed. The overflow channels had settled. The infrastructure had done what infrastructure did after a stress event: it had returned to equilibrium and forgotten, in its mechanical way, that anything had happened.

  He filed his log. Voss accepted it without comment, which was Voss's standard response to adequate paperwork. The afternoon passed. Marcus ate lunch on the canal wall with Kael and Pell and watched the barges move through the junction and the three-hat barge pilot, who was wearing what was either hat number three or a new hat entirely, navigate the southern lock with the fluid competence of a man who had done it ten thousand times and would do it ten thousand more.

  The day ended. Nothing happened.

  Tuesday was also normal.

  The weather had committed to clearing after a morning of grey indecision, and by noon the canal district had the warm, bright quality it took on when the sun hit the stone walls and the water and the mana-infused air and turned everything slightly luminous. Marcus ran his route. His readings were clean. Sera asked a question about valve calibration during the morning break that she already knew the answer to, which was her way of testing the social temperature of the crew the way you test bathwater with the back of your hand.

  Pell had confirmed the existence of a fifth hat on the barge pilot and was treating this as vindication of his entire observational methodology. The fifth hat was, by Pell's account, a flat-crowned thing with a wide brim that appeared only during the afternoon run and was possibly waterproofed, which raised questions about the pilot's relationship to weather prediction that Pell considered scientifically significant. Kael listened to this with the expression of a man who was being asked to care about hats and was choosing, with some effort, not to.

  Marcus logged his readings. He ate lunch on the canal wall. He ate flatbread with the dried river herbs, which was still excellent. Pell joined them late and spent the meal constructing a revised hat chronology that accounted for weather patterns, tidal schedules, and the possibility that the barge pilot was making a statement about something, though Pell couldn't say what. Marcus listened the way you listen to rainfall on a roof, letting the sound exist without requiring it to mean anything.

  He went home at the end of shift. He ate stew at Grainer's. The stew was lamb. The bread fought back. Grainer was behind the bar, wiping the same section of wood he'd been wiping when Marcus came in, his left hand trembling with its usual persistent shake. The wooden bird sat on its shelf above the bottles. Marcus had never asked about the bird. He suspected the answer, if there was one, belonged to whatever Grainer carried in the spaces between his silence.

  Nothing happened.

  Wednesday was when the nothing started to feel like something.

  It was in the small things. The things that weren't there.

  Voss came through the east yard during the morning assembly and stopped to talk to Renner about a supply order. This was normal. Voss talked to crew leads about supplies on a regular basis, because supplies were the kind of tangible, manageable problem that supervisors could actually solve, unlike the intangible, unmanageable problems that constituted the rest of their responsibilities. What was not normal was that Voss didn't look at Marcus while he was there. Voss always looked at Marcus. Not with warmth or suspicion but with the professional attention of a supervisor who had a new variable on his crew and was monitoring its performance the way you monitor a new piece of equipment during its break-in period. The looking was routine. Its absence was not.

  Marcus noticed and said nothing.

  At the junction checkpoint, Orna stamped his assignment slip without meeting his eyes. She'd met his eyes every morning for three weeks. Her "Morning" was the same word delivered with the same inflection and the same flat efficiency, but it was directed at the slip rather than at him, and the difference between eye contact and no eye contact was the difference between a person acknowledging your presence and a person processing your paperwork.

  He noticed and said nothing.

  During the route, he passed a section where two canal authority administrators were inspecting the flow gauge at Station Ten. They were not on his route. Station Ten was upstream of his section, in the territory managed by a different crew. The administrators wore the grey-green coats of the flow records office, Taveth's department, and they were taking readings with the focused intensity of people who had been told to look for something and hadn't been told what it was.

  They didn't look at him when he passed. They looked at their clipboards. Both of them. Simultaneously.

  At the midday break, the flatbread vendor at the canal wall stall served him his usual order and then moved to the next customer with a quickness that was probably nothing. The vendor was busy. The line was long. The day was warm and people wanted to eat. There was no reason to read meaning into the pace of flatbread service. Marcus read meaning into it anyway, the way you read meaning into everything when the social weather changes and you can feel the barometric drop but can't point to a cloud.

  "You're doing the thing," Kael said.

  They were sitting on the canal wall, legs dangling, the water moving below them with the steady purpose of a system that had somewhere to be. Kael's grey-tan skin caught the midday light, the faint sandstone grain patterns visible on his forearms where his sleeves were rolled up for the morning's work. He was eating flatbread with the deliberate thoroughness that characterized his approach to food and to most other things.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  "What thing," Marcus said.

  "The thing where you eat flatbread and look at everything like it's a load-bearing calculation." Kael took another bite. "Your jaw does the thing."

  "I'm eating."

  "You're eating and your jaw is doing the thing. The thing it does when you're processing something. Lira calls it your engineering face."

  Marcus's jaw was, presumably, doing the thing. He took another bite and watched the canal traffic. A barge was moving south, loaded with timber, riding low in the water, and the pilot was the three-hat man, except today he was wearing a hat Marcus hadn't seen before, which was either the elusive fourth hat or evidence that the hat situation was more complicated than Pell's taxonomy allowed.

  "Something feels off," Marcus said.

  "Off how?"

  He considered the question. The barges moved. The locks cycled. The canal ran. The flatbread was good and the weather was warm and his coworkers were doing their jobs and his readings were clean and Voss was talking to Renner about supplies and Orna was stamping slips and the administrators from the flow records office were inspecting gauges and nobody was doing anything wrong and nothing was out of place and everything was fine and the fineness of everything was the thing that felt wrong.

  "I don't know. People are being normal."

  Kael looked at him. Then he looked at the canal. Then he ate his flatbread. After a while he said, "Normal is concerning when it's deliberate."

  They sat on the canal wall and ate and watched the barges and didn't say anything else about it. The gull that had become a regular presence at their lunch spot landed on the far wall and inspected them with the professional interest of an animal that had learned to associate these particular humans with the possibility of crumbs. Marcus had nothing to offer it. The gull accepted this with the pragmatic grace of a creature that understood investment and return.

  The afternoon shift started. Marcus ran his route. His readings were clean. Everything was fine.

  Everything was, in a way that he couldn't articulate and couldn't prove and couldn't stop feeling, slightly wrong.

  Renner found him at the end of Wednesday's shift.

  This was unusual. Renner didn't seek people out. Renner existed in a fixed orbit around his tools and his section and his end-of-day beer at the canal-side tavern where they knew his name and his order, and if you wanted to talk to him you entered his orbit and waited for him to acknowledge your existence, which he would, eventually, in his own time, at his own pace, with the unhurried certainty of a man who had never rushed anything in his life and saw no reason to start.

  He found Marcus at the tool washing station. He stood there for a moment with the flat expression of a man who was going to say something and was going to take exactly as long as he needed to decide how to say it and not one second longer.

  "Schedule review meeting," Renner said. "Last Friday."

  Marcus turned off the basin tap. "I wasn't at a schedule review meeting last Friday."

  "No. You weren't." Renner picked up a wrench from the drying rack, looked at it, put it back. The wrench was already dry. The looking was a thing his hands needed to do while his mouth decided what words to produce. "There was one. Voss and the three section supervisors and someone from the district coordinator's office. I don't usually know who's at those meetings because I don't usually care. I know about this one because Pell's uncle works in the coordinator's office and Pell can't not tell people things."

  Marcus waited. Waiting was the correct response to Renner's communication style. You gave him space and he filled it at his own speed and what came out was usually worth the wait.

  "The meeting was about section assignments," Renner said. "Specifically, about whether certain inspection routes should be restructured to reduce individual exposure to critical infrastructure." He said the last phrase the way you'd say a sentence you'd memorized from someone else's vocabulary, each word receiving exactly the emphasis that indicated it had been received secondhand and was being delivered without endorsement. "That's how Pell's uncle described it. Reduce individual exposure."

  "Whose individual exposure?"

  Renner looked at him. It was the reassessing look, the one he'd been giving Marcus for weeks, except this time the calculation behind it was different. Less about competence and more about something else. Something that looked, on Renner's weathered face, like the beginning of worry, except Renner didn't worry, Renner endured, which meant this was something that had pushed past endurance into a territory Renner didn't visit often and didn't like.

  "They didn't use your name," Renner said. "Pell's uncle said they talked about the expanded route and whether it should be split between two workers instead of one. About whether any single worker should have independent access to the southern junction." He paused. "That's your route, Cole. Nobody else has an expanded route on the eastern section. Nobody else has been running the junction solo."

  He put the wrench back on the rack. He'd already put it there once. This was the most agitated Marcus had ever seen Renner, and it manifested as a man putting a wrench on a rack twice and speaking in sentences that were three words longer than his usual maximum.

  "I'm not telling you what to do with this," Renner said. "I'm telling you it happened. What you do about it is your business."

  He walked away. Marcus stood at the tool washing station and looked at the wrench on the rack and thought about the specific phrase reduce individual exposure, which was the kind of language that sounded like safety and meant something else entirely. It was the language of liability. Of containment. Of making sure that no single person was in a position to see the whole picture, because the whole picture was something that certain people preferred to keep unassembled.

  He went to Sable's shop after shift. The light was on. The door was unlocked. She was at the cutting table with a measuring tape and a piece of charcoal-grey fabric that looked expensive enough to make him reconsider his understanding of what fabric could cost.

  "Not now, Cole," she said.

  He stopped in the doorway. In seven weeks of knowing Sable, she had never told him not now. She had told him she was busy. She had told him she wasn't open. She had told him to sit down and stop hovering and once, memorably, she had told him that his shirt was a color that didn't exist in nature and should be ashamed of itself. But she had never closed a door before he walked through it.

  "When?" he said.

  "Not now." She didn't look up. Her hands moved on the fabric. Her shears were beside her but she wasn't cutting. She was measuring the same piece she'd been measuring when he walked in, and measuring it again, running the tape along the selvage with the focused attention of someone checking a figure they already knew, which was something Sable didn't do because Sable measured once and cut once and the cut was always right.

  She was nervous. Sable was nervous. Marcus had not known that Sable was capable of being nervous, and seeing it on her, the way it manifested not as visible anxiety but as the repetition of a task she'd already completed, as a disruption in the seamless efficiency that was her professional signature, was more unsettling than anything Renner had told him.

  "Okay," he said. "Not now."

  He left. The door closed behind him. The bell rang, the small bright sound that announced customers entering and leaving, a sound he'd heard dozens of times and that had never before carried any particular weight. The market street was doing what it did in the early evening, the transition from commerce to domesticity, vendors packing up their stalls, residents walking home, the smell of dinners starting in kitchens above shops. A normal evening. A normal city.

  He walked to Grainer's. The common room was half-full. Grainer was behind the bar. His left hand trembled. The wooden bird sat on its shelf. The stew was waiting.

  Marcus sat at his table. He ate. The stew was good. The bread fought back. Around him, the inn did what it always did, which was provide food and shelter and the kind of anonymity that came from a place where nobody asked questions because nobody wanted answers.

  A canal worker at the next table was telling a story about a valve failure on the upper section that had sprayed a full crew with canal water. The story was funny. People laughed. The valve failure had happened three days ago and it was already a story, already processed into the digestible format of workplace humor, the way all workplace accidents were processed once the immediate danger passed and the retelling could begin. Nobody was connecting it to anything larger because why would they. Valve failures happened. That was what valves did eventually.

  Marcus ate his stew. He went upstairs. He lay on the bed. He looked at the ceiling crack.

  No system message appeared. No text in his vision. No clinical observation from whatever was watching him and classifying him and reviewing his file. Just the quiet, and the canal outside the window, and the crack in the plaster, and the feeling of a city holding its breath around him in a way that was either paranoia or pattern recognition and he had lost the ability to tell the difference between those two things because they felt exactly the same.

  Nothing had happened. For three days, nothing had happened. The canal ran. The infrastructure held. His coworkers did their jobs. His supervisor talked about supplies. The flatbread vendor served flatbread. The barge pilot wore hats.

  Nothing had happened, and the nothing was the loudest sound Marcus had heard since arriving in this city.