Chapter 4: Stability

The Association called it a stability run.

The rules for it fit on a laminated card that Da-hae read aloud in the lamp house at one o'clock.

"Sixty minutes on the floor. One gauge reading at the far wall. Two wardens, one owner, one inspector."

"If anyone is hurt, it goes in the record."

"And if the record says unstable?" Seok-hyun said.

"Then the board reads that line first at your Article 31 hearing, and it stops reading."

She clipped the card to her belt next to the mint tin. "Nobody's hurt, then."

The two wardens sat on the bench with their helmets on their knees.

The older one was broad and gray at the temples, rated C.

His skill, [Shield], put a pane of pale air in front of him for a few seconds.

The younger was a woman of twenty or so, rated D, who could feel a living thing's heartbeat through a wall.

Both of them had registered dungeons before, and both had the careful faces of people who had seen the end of those jobs.

The Association paid wardens ninety thousand won a day, and a warden who was hurt was paid nothing, because the Act called it voluntary.

Seok-hyun noticed that, and filed it with the other things about this country he now meant to change.

He took them down at twenty past one.

In the hall, the lamps burned along both walls and the floor between was swept clean.

His father had hung a brass tag under every third hook, and now that he could read them he knew what they said.

LANE, along the left wall, where the lamps stood closest and the crawlers never came.

FALL, along the right, where the amber seams in the roof ran thin and the coal dropped now and then without warning.

DARK, down the middle, for the rest.

"He labeled it," the older warden said, quietly. "He ran it like a shift."

"He was," said Seok-hyun.

Da-hae set down her case and took out the gauge.

It was a brass drum the size of a teacup, with a glass face and a steel spike on a short rod.

She turned a knob on its side and watched the needle.

It did not move.

She tapped the glass and turned the knob the other way.

"Surge index," she said. "Zero point zero."

"Is that good?" he asked.

"It's never happened." She said it flatly, looking at the needle. "Every dungeon I've registered reads between twenty and ninety."

"A zero means nothing in here is straining to get out."

He thought of forty crawlers waiting in the dark for a bell, and of thirty-eight lamps that held them, and he said nothing.

She walked the lane first, with the gauge at her chest, and wrote numbers on her left hand with the pen.

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