The bridge smelled of river and old iron before Ivy could see it properly. She unshouldered her pack, set the tripod down with the deliberate care of someone who had learned to treat weight as a paragraph in a conversation with gravity, and let the morning open around the survey markers. A gull argued with a distant barge; from the corner bakery, someone tuned a radio to a gardening show and the air carried the soft, almond-sweet ghost of cardamom buns. On the low roof of the building opposite, five rectangular planters leaned against a flimsy trellis like a tiny, persistent market; the neighbors had grown basil, lemon thyme and something called Vietnamese coriander whose name Ivy always mispronounced. It was a detail she liked without needing to do anything about it.
She clipped the digital caliper onto the cross-girder and crouched, elbows branching like the hands of a clock. Her knees made a soft scuff against the metal catwalk. Tools were an alphabet she could read by touch: the weight of the torque wrench, the slight play in a Phillips driver, the way a cheap magnetic tray betrayed a part destined to walk away. She ran a fingertip along the treated surface until she found the hairline fissure and, when she tapped it with the butt of the gauge, the crack answered with a sound like a small complaint—metal with a note of fatigue.
"Morning, Ivy. You and your instruments again. You measure everything," Marta called from the fence, hands full of a laundry basket that smelled faintly of lemon oil and the stew they'd be serving that afternoon at the community center. Marta never learned the word 'reserve.' She kept her life in open crates and named the contents.
Ivy straightened, letting out a breath that rearranged her shoulders into professional posture. "Measured is safer than sorry," she said, though the sentence landed with less conviction than the hinge of the old gate. She unfolded the plate with the inspection stamps, scribbled notes into her tablet, toggled through the structural manual in her head and on the screen. Her eyes ran the checklist like someone reading a recipe while the stew bubbled—calculated, careful. The community center's picnic table beyond the rail hosted a tableau of neighborhood life: an elderly man knitting a lime-green scarf that would be too short by every standard except his own, two teenagers arguing over whether the percussion student could be considered a busker if he only drummed on milk crates, and a woman teaching a toddler to balance a spoon on her nose. The bridge sat between these domestic sketches and the river, a thin throat of wood and steel that connected unglamorous daily needs.
Eli coasted up on his scooter, wore headphones like a halo. He hopped off and offered her a grin that did not ask for permission. "You really could put a little plaque up. ‘Inspected by Ivy, Keeper of the Screws.'" He tapped the caliper as if testing whether it would complain.
She allowed herself a small smile. "Keeper of the Screws is a promotion from ‘person who talks to bolts.'"
Humor landed lightly; it was a thing she had to accept from people, like rain. She moved to the span and set the deflectometer at mid-bay, checking zero bias as her fingers found the controls. The readout mattered because it was the language the city respected. The language did not know names. It knew only numbers and tolerances.
The reading stuttered and then settled. Ivy braced both hands, felt the tiny give underfoot, and felt how the vibration of people crossing would be less of a chorus and more of a demand on a paper-thin patience. She checked bolts, pried away the covering plate with a practiced wrist, and exposed a threaded rod whose surface had the kind of crystalline fissuring that meant long exposure to winter and too many iffy paint jobs. The specimen did not argue. Faith, sympathy, nostalgia—none of them made a fatigued metal join breathe easier.