WORLD OF FICTION (WOF)

Facilities built two versions of Kestrel’s fifteenth step because the plans disagreed. Neve Lar put them side by side on the dead-stone bench and refused to let anyone label either one ORIGINAL.

The first model followed the older construction drawing. Beneath step fifteen sat a solid landing block with a shallow iron shoe bolted into the rear wall, positioned low enough to catch the step if its front support failed. The second model followed a maintenance copy made fourteen months later. That drawing showed a drainage cavity beneath the same step, and the iron shoe was gone.

Mira received both measurements in Logistics. She remained advisory only, working left-handed with her right arm inside the lighter sling while Priya read the copied plans from the other side of the drawerless desk. Priya was still prohibited from the Kestrel level, and nobody suggested that paper made the restriction meaningless.

"Which drawing is later?" Priya asked.

"The drainage copy."

"Which one matches the current extracted stone?"

"Unknown," Mira said. "The pocket is sealed around the part we need to see."

Lio Fen sat beside Priya with the identity slate lowered. "Can Facilities inspect outside geometry without opening it?"

"They already have."

Neve’s measurement sheet showed four accessible faces around the extracted stair. Three matched both drawings closely enough to be useless. The fourth, beneath the lower-right edge of step fifteen, contained two circular depressions in the surrounding stone that did not appear on the later maintenance copy.

Priya put her finger beside them. "Bolt holes."

"Possible bolt holes."

"You are enjoying that word now."

"No."

The depressions were old enough that dust had hardened inside them. Neither connected to the current counterbrace. Facilities had photographed them before the first outside support was installed, which mattered because nobody could later claim the ring had created the marks.

Neve requested permission to take a physical depth cast. Amadi approved because the cast required no Kestrel opening, no movement of the installed supports, and no contact with the sealed step itself. Senka still informed the occupants through the knock plate before Facilities touched the surrounding stone.

"We are measuring two old depressions outside the sealed stair," Senka said. "We are not moving the brace or the step."

One knock answered.

"If the measurement causes pain, use the rapid pain signal."

One knock again.

Neve pressed soft wax into the first depression with a wooden rod. Nothing changed on the strain dial. The second cast also came free without a pain signal.

Both holes had square iron staining at their deepest point. The older plan’s landing shoe used square-headed anchor bolts.

That was still not enough to prove the shoe had been installed. Builders reused hardware dimensions, and the route level had been repaired more than once. Neve carried the casts to the dead-stone bench instead of making the conclusion beside Kestrel.

The older model accepted them. The spacing matched within two millimetres.

The maintenance copy did not show any object using those holes. Amadi requested every physical alteration record covering the fourteen-month gap between the two drawings. Records returned seven work orders, three inspection slips, one damaged shift board, and an invoice for drainage stone that had been filed under market sanitation because Crossing Control had borrowed the material.

No dramatic red seal appeared. Nobody had written REMOVE THE SAFETY CATCH in the margin.

The relevant work order was ordinary.

K-STAIR LOWER DRAINAGE RETROFIT.

REPEATED WATER COLLECTION BELOW STEPS 14–16.

CLEAR CAVITY TO SOUTH CHANNEL.

REUSE SERVICEABLE IRON WHERE POSSIBLE.

The completion section listed three tasks.

REMOVE LOWER INFILL.

CUT SOUTH CHANNEL.

REINSTALL LANDING HARDWARE.

The first two carried physical completion punches. The third did not.

Priya read the blank square twice. "Unfinished."

"Unrecorded," Mira said.

"Difference?"

"It could have been completed and not punched."

"Or not completed."

"Yes."

They searched the handoff field. It was blank too.

The work order predated the current Facilities protocol by years, long before Sefa, Harun, and Bellan had learned how much damage could fit inside an unmarked handoff. This older form recorded a job as one unit. Someone could finish two-thirds of it, move to another task, and leave the remaining state visible only if another person remembered.

Records found the crew list. Four names remained legible. Two workers had died years later. One had left the Errata before its current structure existed. The fourth, Toma Veck, still worked three levels below Housing as a stone cutter.

Amadi did not summon him to Kestrel. She sent a plain request asking whether he remembered the drainage retrofit and whether he wanted to answer questions about old work. Toma replied twenty minutes later.

YES.

NOT AT THE STAIR.

They met in a neutral workshop with the two dead-stone models on separate tables. Toma was sixty, narrow through the shoulders, and wore a leather guard over two missing fingertips on his left hand. He looked at the models before anyone explained which plan was older.

"That one is wrong," he said, pointing at the drainage version.

Neve did not write yet. "Which part?"

"No catch."

"The iron shoe?"

"We called it the heel."

"Was it installed before the retrofit?"

"Yes."

"How do you know?"

"I removed it."

The answer changed the room without solving it.

Toma had been the youngest worker on the drainage crew. Water collected beneath steps fourteen through sixteen whenever route condensation ran down the western wall. The original infill absorbed some of it until the stone began cracking. The retrofit opened a cavity and cut a channel toward the south drain.

"The heel blocked the cut," Toma said. "We took it out."

"Who was supposed to put it back?" Amadi asked.

"Me and Serren."

"Serren?"

"Dead."

"Did you reinstall it?"

Toma looked at the older model. "No."

Neve waited. "Why?"

"South channel was too high. If we put the heel back where it was, water hit the plate and pooled again. Supervisor said he’d request a narrower replacement."

"Name?"

Toma gave it. Records already showed the supervisor had transferred two months later and died years after that.

"Was the stair left without a catch?" Priya asked through the mechanical line from Logistics.

Toma looked toward the grille. "For the shift."

"Only the shift?"

"I don’t know."

"Did you report it?"

"On the work order."

Neve placed the physical copy in front of him. The third completion square remained blank.

Toma stared at it. "That isn’t my handwriting."

"We know."

He turned the page over. Nothing was there. "I wrote HOLD FOR NARROW HEEL across the bottom."

No such line survived on the current copy.

Records inspected the paper beneath angled light. A scraped patch crossed the lower margin. Something had been erased mechanically before the form was archived.

Amadi did not ask whether a conspiracy had removed it. "Could ordinary copying have done that?"

The Records clerk examined the fibres. "Yes. If the original note was written in soft transfer pencil and the form was pressed against another sheet, later cleaning could remove the loose layer."

"Could someone have erased it deliberately?"

"Also yes."

Two possibilities. No choice between them.

Toma looked angry enough that Neve moved the work order farther from his hands, not because he had threatened it but because old paper did not need to become the second casualty of the retrofit.

"I told Serren," he said. "He told the supervisor. We put a red board across the stair."

"How long?"

"Until the replacement came."

"Did it?"

"I was moved to east drainage the next morning."

No one could honestly extend his memory beyond that. Toma did remember one more physical detail: the narrow replacement heel had already been drawn in chalk on a scrap of stone before he left.

He sketched it from memory. The replacement would have sat lower than the original catch, leaving the new drainage channel open while still giving the rear edge of step fifteen somewhere to land.

Neve compared the sketch to the two old bolt holes. "Different bolt spacing."

"Yes."

"Then if they replaced it, they would drill new holes."

"Yes."

The accessible outer stone around current Kestrel showed only the old pair.

That was stronger evidence. Still not proof, because a narrower heel could have attached inside the sealed face they could not see.

Mira’s timer rang through the Logistics line. She stopped talking immediately.

Priya heard her chair move. "Pause."

"I know."

This time no argument followed. Mira left the line while Neve reconstructed the narrow heel on the dead-stone model using Toma’s measurements.

The first test was simple. With no catch installed, they supported the replica step at the angle recorded in the oldest pre-collapse inspection and removed its front block.

The stone dropped six centimetres into the drainage cavity and struck nothing. The weighted rig caught it before the bench did.

With the original heel installed, the step dropped less than two centimetres and landed on iron.

With Toma’s remembered narrow heel, it fell three centimetres and landed while leaving the south channel open.

Neve reset the model. "Three physical outcomes."

Amadi nodded. "None established as Kestrel’s."

When Mira returned from her required pause, Priya read the results back. Mira did not ask which one looked most likely.

"What do the current outer measurements allow?"

"Old heel definitely once had anchor points," Neve said. "No visible evidence of the narrow replacement on accessible stone."

"Then the next question isn’t whether the pocket wants a catch."

Senka looked at the sealed-contact schedule. "What is it?"

Mira answered from Logistics. "Whether step fifteen had somewhere physical to land before the drainage work."

They did not ask that day. Toma had supplied enough new evidence that the panel wanted the wording reviewed before putting his memory into the occupants’ mouths.

Toma left with a copy of his current statement. He refused to sign the old completion form because it did not show the note he remembered writing.

His new statement ended:

I REMOVED THE ORIGINAL LANDING HEEL DURING THE DRAINAGE RETROFIT.

I REMEMBER LEAVING THE STAIR BLOCKED FOR A NARROWER REPLACEMENT.

I DID NOT PERSONALLY INSTALL THAT REPLACEMENT.

I DO NOT KNOW WHETHER SOMEONE ELSE DID.

He signed TOMA VECK.

The dead-stone models remained on the bench after everyone left. One had a solid landing. One had a drainage cavity. Between them sat the narrow iron heel that existed only in a current worker’s memory and a fresh reconstruction.

Kestrel’s fall had begun before Mother. Now the panel had found a place that may once have stopped it.

They still did not know whether that place had been there when the stair came down.

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