Chapter 415: What the Map Missed

Chapter 415: What the Map Missed

"Here’s what I don’t like," Vasha said slowly. "We can see it’s changed since the survey. We don’t know how much."

She tapped the map. "It’s from spring. Since then, part of the terrace has fallen off, the post’s leaning, and something’s still moving." She looked at Petra. "What else is wrong that we can’t see?"

"And the exposure’s right above the slump," Petra said. "We’d be standing on it. Hammering."

Jin hadn’t thought of that. Taking a sample meant standing in one place for a while, hitting rock, with three beasts beside them. Glitch alone weighed more than a cart.

"The lower one’s adequate," Petra said.

"Adequate." Vasha made a face and looked at her watch. "Eight-forty. From here, the valley’s—"

"Ninety minutes. Maybe a hundred," Petra said. "We have to go back along the terraces first."

"So we’re at the lower exposure by half ten. Sample by eleven. Then back, uphill, with the badger."

"She’ll do it," Petra said. "She’ll complain."

Vasha looked at the green leaves on the fallen tree one last time.

"Valley," she said.

Jin let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.

"Valley," Petra agreed.

Behind them, well back on solid ground, Dunmore was writing on his slate. He didn’t look up.

The valley route was long, and parts of it were miserable. A switchback track took them down to the stream, steep and muddy, with the badger on her belly again and Glitch picking his way like an old man on a staircase.

At the bottom, Petra paced out a stretch of the stream path against her watch, counting under her breath.

"Fourteen minutes a kilometer on the flat," she said. "Slower uphill."

"Then we eat walking," Vasha said.

"And we don’t go round to look at the waterfall," Petra said, because the map showed one a little off the path.

"I wasn’t going to suggest the waterfall."

"You were thinking about it."

"I was thinking about it," Vasha admitted.

Jin kept Flicker up ahead, low over the stream, watching for anything worse than mud.

They came round the end of the spur at twenty past ten.

The lower seam emerged beyond the spur, well east of the loose fan beneath the slump. They checked the approach before unloading: firm exposed rock underfoot, no fresh debris above it. Water had stained the seam dark, and lichen crusted its upper edge.

But it was there, a band of blue-grey rock as wide as Jin’s arm span, running into the hill.

Vasha glanced back toward the richer exposure, high on the wall beyond the spur. Then she opened the sample kit.

"Let’s find a sound piece."

The sample took longer than any of them wanted.

Petra checked the seam first, the slow way. She ran her gloved hand along the band of rock and pressed at the edges where the lichen crust met it. In two places, the outer layer came away in her fingers like stale bread.

"Weathered," she said. "We can’t take it from the surface. We’d be sending them dirt."

Jin used Appraisal on the clean rock beneath, where she’d brushed the crust away.

[Mineral seam — energy-bearing (ordinary). Charge: low to moderate. Outer layer degraded.]

C-Rank Appraisal never told him anything clever about rock. But it told him the seam was what the survey said, and that the outside was worse than the inside.

"It’s the right stuff," he said. "Better further in."

Vasha picked the spot. She went along the seam until she found a place where a crack had already opened a little, so they wouldn’t have to hammer long.

She chiselled a shallow notch under the weathered layer and chipped out a piece the size of a walnut from the fresh face behind it.

The fresh face was dark and glassy, with a faint shimmer.

Petra held a padded sleeve open while Vasha lifted the piece with her gloved hand, keeping the fresh face clear of the loose dirt.

It went into a padded sleeve. Petra wrote the label: site, exposure, time and their three names.

Jin checked the grid reference against the map while Petra read it back. He added ’lower exposure’ beside the site number so there could be no confusion with the richer face above.

The sleeve went into the hard case, and the case went into Vasha’s pack, wrapped in her spare jumper.

"It’s not as good as the top one," Vasha said, looking up the wall.

"No," Jin said.

"It’ll do."

It was eleven-twenty.

Jin felt the morning in his legs as the return path climbed. His reserve remained comfortable; his shoulders still ached under the pack.

Petra found a lower track on the map that followed the stream further east before climbing toward the gate hut at a gentler angle. Longer on paper, but with fewer switchbacks.

"The badger loses more on steep ground than she does on distance," she said. "So do I."

It still climbed. Twice Petra had to kneel and coax the badger up a section of loose stones with dried meat from her pocket.

Vasha went ahead with the Ridgerunner and came back to report what the track did next and how far until it flattened out.

Jin kept the time. He’d timed every stretch since the stream, the way he’d time a route in a game he meant to run twice. Fourteen minutes a kilometer on the flat. Closer to twenty-two on the climb.

At one o’clock, he did the sum out loud.

"Three kilometers left, mostly climb. If it’s all twenty-two minutes, we’re in a little after two. Call it ten past, without stops."

"And if the badger sits down?" Vasha said.

"Then it’s later."

"She won’t sit down," Petra said through her teeth. "Will you? You won’t sit down."

They kept moving, but the last climb was steeper than Jin had allowed for. He revised their arrival time after the first bend. A water stop and a narrow stretch where they took the beasts through separately used the remaining margin.

They reached the gate hut at two-thirty-eight. Jin checked the hut clock against his own watch before letting himself relax.

Vasha handed the case to the duty officer, who checked the label against the map reference and wrote down the time. Dunmore came in a few minutes later. Jin had caught sight of him perhaps five times all day. He wasn’t even out of breath.

He looked at the sample, at the label, and at the three of them, muddy to the knee and leaning on the table. He wrote on his slate, nodded once, and went out again.

"That’s it?" Vasha said.

"That’s it," Petra said, and sat down on the floor. The badger lay down on her feet.

At Wednesday’s individual debrief, Dunmore sat beside a second assessor. Jin put his map on the desk, glad he had kept the notes instead of trying to remember everything afterward.

"You went to the Cutback path first," Dunmore said. "You stopped and turned round. Why?"

Jin told him. The leaning post, which had been Petra’s. The scar and the slump, from Flicker’s view. The green leaves on the fallen tree, which had been Vasha’s. The grit moving under the edge, through Glitch.

"Which of those decided it?" the woman asked.

He thought about it.

"None of them on their own. A leaning post’s just a leaning post. It was that there were four. And the survey was wrong about the terrace, so we didn’t know what else it was wrong about."

"And you’d have been standing on it to sample," Dunmore said.

"Petra said that. I hadn’t thought of it."

The woman wrote something down.