The boiling mud churned a handspan from Yutika’s chin, spitting yellow foam. Her body, slick with runoff, picked up momentum. A strangled cry tore from her throat, raw and unadorned by any magistrate’s decorum. “Batzal! No! Hold me!” Batzal’s grip on the rivet was iron. He watched her slide, not with panic, but with a detached precision. His mind, even as the hull groaned, worked to quantify. Her weight, perhaps one hundred and ten ponders, now a perfectly isolated variable. The sudden, clean removal of that mass would instantly raise the hull a full Eklan-width, perhaps more. It would buy them days, not just hours. It would solve the core problem of the sinking structure. The High-Peaks of Oramesh, a distant promise, would become a tangible reality, free from the drag of a Coral-Caste bureaucrat. He saw the ghost of the old academy’s grand archways, felt the sting of her pronouncements during his trial, heard the dry cough of Nim-Rua in the lower decks. The ledger in his head flickered: `Yutika: 110 ponders. Value: Negative. Contribution: Map, now memorized. Penalty: Ruined career, public disgrace. Current state: Mathematical solution.` The vindictive part of him, the cold, resentful part, hummed with a quiet satisfaction. This was it. The ultimate settlement. He could simply watch, a passive observer to the forces of physics he so revered. He could just let go. He could see the terror bloom on her face, the way her eyes, usually so sharp with disdain, now pleaded with an animal desperation. The mud below her began to bubble, little pockets of gas escaping the superheated sludge. Her fingers scrabbled, leaving trails in the dark crust on the brass. “Batzal! Please! The map… I know… I know the currents!” Her voice was a broken whisper, suddenly devoid of its usual haughtiness. “I can still help! Just… help me!” Nim-Rua’s face, thin and pale, flashed in his mind. The way she had thrown herself in front of Yutika during the tilt. The small, kind acts that could never be entered into a ledger. The gray silt slurry caught her skirts, tugging downward with fifty ponders of drag. His hand, calloused from drafting chisels and tension clamps, shot out across the blistered plate. His fingers locked around her wrist, slick with mud. The sudden tension hit his shoulder like an anvil dropped from a crane. He strained, his boots digging into the remaining brass plating. Her body hung from his grasp, dragging him toward the perimeter seam until his ribcage smashed against a raised bracket. “Push!” he gritted out, his voice raw. “Push with your feet! Now!” Yutika, stunned by his sudden grip, found a flicker of strength. Her legs flailed, splashing mud, then she found purchase on a small, raised seam. She pushed, a desperate scramble, and Batzal hauled. Inch by agonizing inch, he dragged her back up the incline, her body scraping against the rough brass. When she finally flopped onto the relatively flat central spine of the roof, gasping, her face was streaked with mud and tears. “Thank you,” she choked, the words foreign on her tongue. “I… thank you.” There was no time for recriminations, no space for lingering vindictiveness. The structure below continued its low, ominous shudder. Batzal simply nodded, already turning his attention to the task. “The latches. We need to hit them. Hard.” He pointed to the rusted bolts along the central ridge, where the massive thermal brass plates overlapped. “The corrosion runs deep. They won’t turn. We need to break the seals.” He pulled a heavy, serrated iron dog from his belt pouch, a lever he’d used for seating hull bolts during the construction. Yutika, still trembling, found a discarded length of brass pipe, its end flattened from impact. They moved with a shared, urgent purpose, no longer adversaries, but desperate partners. Batzal brought the iron dog down with a hollow clang against the first latch. The impact reverberated, sending a jarring vibration through the roof. A faint crack echoed from within the corroded metal, but the plate remained stubbornly in place. Yutika, taking her cue, swung the pipe. A dull thud. Nothing. The brass plates, designed for permanence, resisted their frantic efforts. “Harder!” Batzal yelled, sweat stinging his eyes. He raised the lever with both hands and drove its notched tooth directly against the sheared seam. A sharp, piercing crack split the air. Metal shrieked. A section of the plate, about a fifth of its massive surface, suddenly buckled, tearing away from its securing points with a deafening rip. Boiling mud splashed upward as the detached segment plunged into the tide below. The pagoda lurched, a sudden, buoyant shift. A collective cheer, faint but discernible, rose from the lower decks. The effect was immediate, visceral. The water line, visible through the steam, dropped perceptibly, pulling the hull out of the most dangerous depths. But it was only a fraction of the total weight. “Again!” Yutika screamed, invigorated by their small victory. She struck her pipe against the next latch with a renewed ferocity. The brass pipe bent, but the latch gave way, groaning like a dying beast. Batzal followed up, smashing the final, stubborn points. With a thunderous roar, the second, larger section of thermal brass plating tore free, twisting as it plummeted into the mud, sending up a massive, boiling plume. The effect was exhilarating, terrifying. The Buoyant Pagoda, suddenly shedding hundreds of ponders of ballast, sprang upward. Not a gentle rise, but a violent, explosive surge. The angle of the roof changed instantly, tilting sharply skyward. Batzal, still gripping the iron dog, lost his footing completely. His body flew upward, then slammed back down, sliding with terrifying speed toward the exposed edge. His fingers, burning from the hot metal, scrabbled wildly. One hand, by sheer luck, found purchase on a jagged, splintered seam where the roof had ripped away, leaving him dangling precariously over the steaming void.

The Final Calculation