Mara brought a thermos to the closed bridge because the technician from Orra had said he would be there at nine. At nine by her watch, he was already packing his radio away.
“I waited,” he said through the barrier.
“So did I. Last Thursday.”
Below them, the Aven ran between exposed bars of gravel. The upstream half of the bridge belonged to Orra. The barrier stood where its maintenance crew had stopped replacing the planks. On Mara's side, in Vey, somebody had painted a red cross on each rotten board, though a visitor would have had to step on several to read them all.
The man looked at his watch. Mara held hers up. They stared at the two faces.
“Capital time,” he said.
“Mine too.”
He laughed once, without pleasure. “Different capital.”
His name was Iven. He showed her the chart she had returned marked check date. The upper station had recorded a rise at 19:05 on Tuesday. When it reached Mara's office, the clock above her desk had said 18:12. She had taken it for a printer error and telephoned the number on the form. The phone had rung in an empty room until the line cut off.
“Stores,” Iven said when she gave him the number. “They moved us out of there in winter.”
When nobody rang back that evening, he had assumed the message had arrived too late to be useful.
Mara unscrewed the thermos. She had brought only one cup. Iven drank from the lid while she knelt on a sound plank and spread the chart between them. She wrote Orra capital time beside 19:05 and Vey 18:05 underneath. The rise had begun seven minutes before the report reached her. Then she had lost more time trying to send it back.
They compared the rest of the readings. His gauge measured from a painted mark on stone; hers sent a signal to the district office. His chart called a mark “zero” that was not the same height as hers. When Iven leaned over to point, Mara put a hand on his sleeve.
“That board.”
He moved his foot.
By the time the thermos was empty, the chart had acquired a place, a time standard and the name of the person who had taken each reading. They agreed to give changes in water level at each station, without treating the two zero marks as one. Iven wrote his duty number in the margin. Mara made him ring hers while she stood there.
Her pocket buzzed. For a moment they both smiled.
At the district office, Controller Leta turned the chart over to see what Mara had written on the back.
“And when he's off duty?”
Mara had not asked.
“And when you're here at the river and I'm here with a telephone?”
Mara pulled out the chair opposite her. They made a duty list. Leta authorised a practice call for the next afternoon, with no public warning. On the station expenses sheet she crossed out Mara's request for a replacement sensor and moved it to the next month.
“The practice costs nothing,” she said.
Mara looked at the fuel vouchers in Leta's tray but did not argue yet.
During the practice, Iven reported an imaginary rise and the relief clerk repeated it back using Vey's time. The clerk then named the wrong bend on the district map. Mara found that his map still showed the old ferry, three kilometres above the village.
Leta took that copy off the wall herself.
Just after five, Mara rang the village contact. Nobody answered.
“Try him tomorrow,” the clerk said.
Mara opened the chart. They had put a tick beside the village as soon as they dialled.
She rubbed it out until the paper went furry.
It took a drive to the allotments to find the caretaker. He listened with his hoe across his knees. He had locked the office at five and left the phone on its charger beside the visitors' book. He was not on duty all night, whatever the council might have promised. Across the road, Sena kept the mill office open until the last delivery. She agreed to hold the village phone after five, provided someone brought it to her charged. The caretaker agreed to do that. Neither would promise that a ring in the office could reach everyone on the lower road.
“There's Pell,” Sena said. “He won't hear it from his house. The machines can be off and he won't hear me call.”
They put a visit beside Pell's name.
Four days later, at 18:17 in Vey, Mara was putting the corrected contact sheet into its plastic cover when Iven called. His voice was difficult to hear under rain striking the station roof.
“Upper station. Orra 19:15. Up sixty centimetres since Orra eighteen forty-five.”
She wrote the times beneath one another and read them back: “Vey 18:15. Sixty centimetres in half an hour.”
“Yes.”
Her screen showed a small rise at the lower station, then a straight line. It had been straight for eleven minutes. She tapped the glass, which accomplished nothing.
“Can you check your mark?” she asked.
“I've just come from it.”
“This call says instrument reading.”
“Then change it. I read the staff. The cabinet's full of water.”
Mara changed the entry. Iven gave the two staff readings separately; she wrote them down and checked the subtraction. Behind her, the office door opened. Leta came in carrying a bag of groceries, one leek protruding over her arm.
Mara put the call on the speaker and slid the chart towards her.
“Your lower station?” Leta asked.
“The signal's stopped changing. I can't tell you the level without going there.”
“How long?”
“Twenty minutes there and back. More if the path's flooded.”
The evening bus was due to take the lower road in ten minutes. Mara had copied that time onto the contact sheet herself. If she went to the gauge, there would be nobody at her desk to take Iven's next reading. The relief clerk lived across town.
Leta asked Iven whether he expected the rise to continue. He told her what he had seen upstream: water across the track, more rain beyond the quarry. He could not tell her what Mara's lower gauge would read.
Leta set the groceries on the floor. “Close the lower road. Precautionary. My name on it.”
Mara reached for the public notice pad.
“And call the bus before you make a fair copy.”
The dispatcher wanted to know who would pay for the detour. Leta took the receiver. While she argued, Mara called Sena on her mobile.
“This is the warning,” Mara said. “Not the practice.”
Sena repeated the road name and the instruction to leave the houses below the mill for the school yard. When Mara asked who would visit Pell, she heard Sena calling away from the phone. A second voice answered, too far off to distinguish.
“Daro's going,” Sena said. “I'll ring when he's back.”
Mara wrote Daro to Pell. She left the space after it empty.
Leta put down the receiver. She had authorised the extra fuel against the district transport account. The bus would take the ridge road and collect people at the school on its return. Then she called the road crew to place barriers at both ends of the lower road, where a driver could still turn.
At 18:31, Iven called with another rise. He had to spell the observer's surname. A colleague had taken this reading while he worked the radio. Mara could hear Leta in the next room trying to find dry blankets.
The lower screen remained still.
At 18:38, Sena rang. Six people from the lower houses were at the school. Pell had refused to leave without his dogs, so Daro had gone back for a length of rope. They were on their way up now.
“Both of them?” Mara asked.
“The dogs?”
“Pell and Daro.”
“I can see them. Daro's carrying one of the dogs.”
Mara filled in the space. Sena said she had to go; people kept asking when they could return, and she had no answer to give them.
An hour later the road crew reported water over the low stretch. Their barriers were still on dry ground. The bus had reached the school, late and half empty. Mara entered each call. When Leta brought tea, she had to shift the chart to make room for the cup.
“The school had no blankets,” Leta said. “We missed that.”
The cupboard in the next room stood open, its shelves empty. Mara could not remember seeing Leta take the blankets.
By eleven, the upper readings were falling. Mara handed the telephone to the relief clerk and showed him the empty spaces that still needed answers. He read the last measurement back to her before she put on her coat.
Her replacement-sensor request was still in next month's tray. She took it out, clipped a copy of the night's blank lower trace to it and placed both on Leta's desk. Then she added the fuel cost from the detour, which Leta had written on the back of a grocery receipt.
Outside, rain ticked against the parked cars. Mara's phone lit up with a message from Iven: Home?
She looked at her watch before answering. On his bank it was already tomorrow.
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