'Can we stop the ceremony?'
'I can recommend that Shinsei withdraw its commissioning support. Calder may still operate equipment it owns under its city contract. That is a legal question. More urgently, I need to know what the hardware will do.'
A security guard approached their table. He was polite, almost apologetic. A man in a gray coat had asked him whether a woman matching Nia's description was inside. The man had not given his name.
Yui closed the manual. Nia began stacking papers, suppressing the urge to run. She looked through the library's tall front windows and saw pedestrians under umbrellas, a bus stopping for students, and a silver sedan parked across the street with its lights off.
'Is that your security?' Nia asked.
Before they separated, Yui photographed the library table with its colored tabs and stacked drawings. She did not include Nia's face. The image recorded the documents in the condition they had reviewed them, a simple step that might matter if pages later changed. Nia took her own photograph from another angle, then wrote down the precise time.
'No,' Yui said.
They left through the rear entrance. Outside, the air smelled of wet pavement and the river's metal breath. Yui did not hurry, which somehow frightened Nia more than if she had. At the corner they separated, agreeing to speak again only after saving copies of the evidence in independent places.
That evening, a city weather alert appeared on Nia's phone. A low-pressure system offshore had shifted its course. The headline predicted a powerful coastal storm by the weekend. Friday's ribbon-cutting was now one day closer to a real test, and the people planning the celebration still seemed to believe those were two different events.
CHAPTER 05
A SEAT AT THE BACK
The emergency committee met Thursday evening in a windowless chamber beneath City Hall. The mayor sat in front of a row of blue flags. Victor Calder occupied the first visitor's chair, close enough to whisper to the city attorney. Nia was assigned a plastic seat in the back row, where the public could watch but not speak unless the chair recognized them.
Camila sat beside her with a reporter's notebook. She had agreed not to publish the technical findings until an independent engineer could verify them. Instead, she was documenting the city's decision-making process. If someone later claimed no warning had been raised, a contemporaneous record would matter.
Yui presented her concern through a secure video link. She showed the unresolved commissioning condition, explained the missing observer signature, and asked that automated demonstrations be suspended pending a physical retest. Her slides were plain. No fireworks, no slogans, and no photograph of herself standing in front of a gate.
Victor's response was polished enough to have been rehearsed. He described the barrier's economic importance, the millions of dollars already invested, and the harm to local confidence if a technical misunderstanding were treated as an emergency. 'We should trust expertise,' he said, drawing a sympathetic murmur from officials who had not read the technical pages.
The mayor asked whether lives were in immediate danger. Yui answered that an untested safeguard did not prove danger, but it removed a basis for claiming safety. The distinction visibly disappointed the mayor, who wanted either reassurance or a dramatic accusation she could dismiss.
Martin introduced a final certification bearing the logo of Shinsei Maritime Systems. Nia recognized the document number. It was a later version of the file whose Japanese warning had printed in the control room. In the certification table, the bypass blackout test was marked PASS.
Yui asked to see the supporting trace data. Martin replied that the files were archived and would take days to retrieve.
From the back row, Nia felt her pulse quicken. If the test had passed, there should be measurements: pressure, valve position, generator voltage, flow rate. A check mark could summarize them, but it could not replace them.
She wrote a question on a folded sheet and passed it to the clerk. Would the committee require original sensor data and the observer record before allowing a live demonstration? The clerk glanced at the note, placed it beneath another stack, and continued looking toward the podium.
During a recess, a woman wearing the city's legal badge approached Nia. Her name was Ada Mercer, assistant city solicitor. She asked to see the copy of the receipt Eli had found. Nia showed her the scan but did not hand over the original.
'I can't promise what the committee will decide,' Ada said. 'But I can tell you that the city has an obligation to examine credible warnings.'
'Then why is the test still green?'
Several Foundry Ward residents attended the committee meeting wearing yellow paper badges that read ASK US ABOUT FLOODS. Marisol Vega had organized them after learning that no neighborhood representative would appear on the official agenda. During the recess, she showed Nia photographs of drainage grates clogged after earlier storms and asked whether the new barrier accounted for rain arriving from inland. Nia explained the difference between main gates and bypass capacity, carefully stating which details she could not verify. Marisol nodded. 'That is the first honest answer I've had all week,' she said. Nia wondered why the most modest statement in the room had become the most unusual.
The committee clerk eventually found Nia's folded question beneath the agenda and apologized for not delivering it in time. The apology was sincere and useless. He said visitors often submitted questions in forms that officials could not process during a crowded meeting. Nia asked whether the city published answers afterward. He did not know. They exchanged email addresses, and she requested that her question enter the official record. It was not dramatic work. It had no audience.
Ada's jaw tightened. 'That is one of the questions I'm asking.'