Dema took the board back, read the number once, and said nothing about why the pace had shifted.
"Then the choir scaffolds come down on the west side instead of the east," she said. "The lantern riggers will complain."
"I am devastated for them."
Dema's mouth tightened at one corner. Not a smile. A clerical weather change. "See that you are more devastated by the prospect of bad drying."
She looked again at the panel. "Good hand today."
That, annoyingly, hurt worse than criticism.
"I know."
"Aye." Dema shifted the ledger board under her arm. "Good work done slowly is still slow."
Then she climbed down without asking the question both of them had declined to dignify.
The morning lengthened. Sun struck the market roofs, then finally her section. She scraped out one line and relaid it cleaner, then caught herself glancing toward the covered walkway when a door thudded below.
By noon the technical problem stopped being something she could solve by stubbornness.
She had reached the part of the flood-record panel where old reef lime sat beneath a later patch, a layered repair over older damage that had been quietly misbehaving since she began. Her own fixative held the first passes well enough, then went matte at the edge where it should have settled clear. Not ruined. Not yet. But the bloom was creeping.
Another two passes and the entire blue date sequence would cloud irreversibly -- not a correctable matte but the dead gray of a fixative that had bonded wrong with the old lime beneath. She would lose the date line, the current marks, two days of careful work underneath.
She sat back on her heels on the plank and stared at the section until anger ran out of useful disguises.
Maruk-oil.
Not any maruk-oil mix, either. His. The workshop formula keyed to this wall's appetite. She had watched him make it often enough to know the steps, not enough to know the final adjustments. Those belonged to his hand and his memory of this reef surface.
Below, the covered walkway lay bright now, a straight practical path from scaffold to workshop. She had crossed it every day for three weeks. She refused to take it now.
No.
If she went now, she would be admitting two things at once, and she could bear one more easily on paper than in his doorway.
She climbed down at second bell and found Dema at the long administrative table under the market awning.
"What has failed."
"Nothing yet." Iva took the blank requisition pad from the table's edge before she could be offered help. "I need maruk-oil fixative from workshop stock. Thin and holding mixes. Measured for the east flood-record panel."
Dema held out a pen.
The form was absurdly tidy: date, section, requested material, quantity, delivery point, authorizing signature. Iva wrote with more pressure than the paper deserved.
Requested material: maruk-oil fixative, thin wash / holding mix. Section: east flood-record panel, upper third. Delivery point: scaffold.
Her name went on the lower line, fully spelled this time because Dema's forms had no room for genteel disappearance.
Dema read it, sanded the ink, and did not look at the workshop.
"I can send a runner," she said.
"That is the idea of a requisition." Paper made a poor shield, but it was still a shield.
"Aye." Dema set it in the outgoing stack. "And yet you know where the workshop is."