Two days after the chamber, the freed road workshop smelled of lamp oil, wet slate and the households' burnt bread. Ferra laid the tin shipping strip across her bench beside three fittings pried loose from the return's oldest repair layers.
'Bottom, middle and top, and only one of those layers is lying to me.'
Hajin leaned in the doorway with a bread roll in each fist, "Are you still glaring at that tin thing?"
"I'm reading it, there's a difference."
"Looks a lot like glaring from here."
She tapped the lowest fitting with her chalk, "This one's original, look how the collar comes off one bar without a seam."
The bottom collar carried one maker's tooling, long patient strokes laid around the bar without a single restart or patch. Above it sat the replacement fittings, rougher and quicker, each stamped with date marks matching the edge of the strip.
"So the guy with the N built the road?" Hajin mumbled around a mouthful of bread.
