The problem was the tool advance mechanism.

Beorn had four versions crossed out in the margin now. The latest was a lever system weighted at the far end to push the cutting tool forward with a constant force. He understood at once why it would fail.

Iron was not uniform through a casting. The softer sections would let the tool run faster, the harder sections would slow it down, and the bore would follow the casting flaws instead of its true center. The result would be wrong in a new way. Possibly worse, because at least the current flaw was predictable.

He drew a diagonal line through it.

His hand kept moving, and now it was sketching the separate condenser chamber for the V3 engine design instead of another attempt at the advance mechanism. He noticed the change and looked down at the page.

The condenser could not be built yet. The engine it belonged to needed a better cylinder than the foundry could make now, and that better cylinder required the machine he had failed to design for two days. His hand had moved away from the problem he could not solve now and toward the problem he could not solve yet.

He turned the page.

The food situation sat on the next sheet. What the granary had, what the rationing reserved from it, and how many days the rations would last if he carried the numbers forward.

The calculation tying the food shortage to the drainage project only ran one way.

More farmland required the V3 engine, the V3 engine required the better cylinder, and the better cylinder required the cutting machine. He had turned the chain over and over, and it still began in the same place every time.

His hand was moving again. He looked at the margin. Four attempts crossed out, plus the condenser sketch that did not belong there, plus the food numbers crowding the adjoining column. The margin was more detailed than the problem deserved, which told him the same thing it always did.

From the bed he could hear her breathing, and he turned his attention on the ledger.

"It’s the middle of the night," she said.

He stopped and looked at her.

She was looking at him. Her eyes were open and focused, none of the vagueness of someone half-asleep, but the full attention of who had been awake for several minutes at least.

"The middle of the fifth one," he said.

She looked up at the ceiling. Something appeared across her expression and was gone before he could read it clearly. He was already leaning forward in the chair.

"Can you move? Do you know where you are? Is the pain more than tiredness?"

She shifted one hand under the blanket and then answered, "One at a time."

He stopped. Her voice was strained, present with no strength left over. She breathed once before answering.

"Yes," she said. "I know where I am. There’s pain, but it’s exhaustion pain. I can move if I need to." A beat. "I don’t need to. Or want to."

He sat back and read the rest of what she had not said. The color of her face, the pace of her breathing, if her hands were shaking under the blanket. Everything told him it was recoverable, with the worst behind her.

"You’ll be in that bed for a few more days," he said. "At minimum."

"Mm." She did not argue.

The candle beside her had burned to the halfway point. The room was cold in the way the citadel was cold at this hour, deep and settled, the stone holding it in place. Neither of them spoke for a moment.

"What happened?" she said.

"The city’s yours"

He leaned forward. "Absolute authority. The high quarter is being quarantined, the mansion is mostly gone, the passage below is sealed. The creature incursion didn’t get past that building."

He let that settle. "Coss’s network is gone from Ashmark. The warehouse arrests, the documents, all of it. The active private force doesn’t exist anymore. There is probably one or another spy still unaccounted for somewhere in the population, but that’s negligible."

She was quiet for a moment. "How many dead?" she said. Her eyes stayed on the ceiling.

"A few dozens throughout the entire city conflict."

"And, Beorn. They saw me. That I’m a Sinbound." she said.

He looked at her. Her hands were flat on the blanket, and she was still looking at the ceiling.

He shrugged. The motion did not matter to her, since she was not watching, but it was there in the half-second before he spoke. "Some of the men wanted to know if we could get a second one."

She turned her head toward him.

He kept his face even.

She stared at him for a moment with the look of someone braced for one kind of news and given something else entirely. The corner of her mouth moved. It almost became a laugh.

"Some were frightened."

Beorn continued, his voice dry. "That faded. The men in that building watched you fight something the size of a warehouse back through the floor. The way they understood it, you saved them. That’s what matters."

She was quiet. Something in her expression changed, not dramatically, but enough for him to read.

"Nobody thinks you caused it," he said.

She looked back at the ceiling.

He exhaled softly, "There was a relic. Coss had it in the hidden room. When he used it to cover his escape, it created the fracture."

Silence followed. She did not ask what kind of relic, or whose account it had come from, or how that version had entered the official record. She understood what was in the telling directly, without needing it explained.

"Right," she said.

She yawned. It came without warning, the way true exhaustion did.

"Keep sleeping," he said. "I’ll stay for the night."

She nestled back. Her eyes stayed open a moment longer, aimed somewhere above her.

"Stop drawing across that page."

She whispered. Her voice was already sliding toward sleep. "I can tell you’ve been on the same problem for hours and you’ve only made it busier."

He looked at the margin. Four crossed-out attempts. The condenser sketch that did not belong there. The food numbers on the adjoining page.

He laughed. It was short and genuine, the involuntary kind, because she had been exactly right about what he had been doing from a position where she had no obligation to notice.

He watched her eyes close.

The room was cold and still. The candle gave off its low light. He looked at the margin for a while longer, then turned to a fresh page in the ledger and wrote one word at the top, then a question mark below it.

Then he sat with the book open on his knee and waited for morning.