Elodie stood with one boot on the cobbled sill and the other braced against the ragged mortar like a surveyor who had mistaken her heart for a plumb line. Morning came through the lane in a brassy wash: fishermen’s carts clacked past, a vendor hawked cardamom pastries folded like little roofs, and a bell tinkled three times for market hour. Damp sea-spray ghosted the lintels, but the living walls had their own ritual of moisture; if you pressed a thumb into certain seams they sighed and tightened as if replying. To everyone else they were just masonry with temperament. To Elodie they were a grammar of forces and small, private responses she could almost read if she squinted and listened.
She clipped a brass caliper to her belt, thumbed the tape from its leather case and let it spill through her fingers like a few obstinate syllables. A boy—one of Kade’s apprentices, all elbows and earnestness—shouldered through the scaffolding with a ladle of broth sloshing at his chin.
“Miss Vale,” he said, offering the ladle with the solemnity of someone presenting a relic. “You’re meant to eat. Warmth does wonders for measuring.”
Elodie suppressed the laugh that wanted to loosen the taut line of her jaw. She plucked the tape from its case instead and shook it out. “I already fed the tolerances,” she said, then bent to take the seam’s offset with quick, sure fingers. The boy peeled his jacket back to reveal a set of thermoses bolted to his belt—an old neighborhood habit—and winked as if to say that at least some crafts still valued soup over geometry.
She hooked the tape and pulled, feeling the micro-movement along the joint. The wall exhaled, an almost-human reprieve where stone met stone. Elodie jacked down a slender iron wedge, pried at a hairline crack, then fitted a shim and coughed away grit from her lips. Every motion was a measurement; every measurement a decision about how weight and seasons conspired.
On the far side of the market a merchant swore softly as a stack of trays tilted under a gust. The tremor from two nights earlier had left finger-prints of misalignment across this block—doors that stuck, sills that leaned, and a hairline seam near the northern elevation that had widened like a mouth about to speak. Elodie knelt and pressed her palm against it. The stone answered with a slow, circular movement no set of calipers had prepared her for.