On New Year's Day the menudo had been on since five, and the kitchen window was fogged to the height of the pot. Abuela was at the six o'clock Mass, the one nobody else went to on the first. Lourdes had meant to leave the Sky Harbor table alone until Monday. It was on the oilcloth under a saucer of chopped onion.
21 FEB 2042. 18:00 1012.3. 19:00 1012.6. 20:00 1015.9. 21:00 1018.4. 22:00 1018.9.
On Wednesday she had written that the front put about two microGal of unlogged air on Tencha's night, and she had widened the sigma both ways, as if the air could have pushed in either direction. It couldn't. The evening tie was at 18:40, before the front. The late tie was at 21:50, after it. Pressure had gone up six and a half hectopascals in between, and more air overhead meant a lower reading, so the late tie had read low. She had known the sign on Wednesday. She had even written the range one-sided, +2.6 to +4.6, and then written a rule underneath it that ignored the sign.
And she had added the widening in a straight line onto a sigma she'd built in quadrature. That was two kinds of arithmetic in one line of capitals.
She wrote it again the way it should have been written.
AMENDMENT 2 (REV. 1/1/49). OVER 2 HPA BETWEEN TIES: SHIFT THE LATER TIE 0.3 µGAL/HPA IN THE DIRECTION THE AIRPORT GIVES, THEN WIDEN BY THE HOURLY BRACKET AT EACH TIE, PLUS UP TO HALF THE SHIFT FOR DISTANCE (25 KM), IN QUADRATURE. THE DISTANCE TERM IS A CAP; A CLOSER STATION MAY SHRINK IT. FRONT IN THE SAME HOUR AS A TIE: DIRECTION UNKNOWN, NOT RESOLVING. THE AIRPORT GIVES A DIRECTION AND A SIZE, NOT A NUMBER FOR THE BASE. 63 / 21 FEB 2042: LATE TIE +2.0. BRACKET 0.3 HPA (0.1 µGAL). SIGMA √(0.9² + 0.1² + 1.0²) ≈ 1.3. CORROBORATED.
Then she wrote the part she didn't want to. The revision narrowed 63's sigma. It helped a party, and the party was Tencha, whose nephew called on Wednesdays because his aunt didn't read her phone. Counsel would say amended three times in fourteen days, and he'd have the count right.
So the cover note said it first. This corrects my 12/30 Amendment 2. It narrows 63's sigma from about 2.1 to about 1.3. That helps 63. The table does not change. The 12/30 text stays in the file, struck, not deleted.
She ruled one line through the old amendment on her own copy so it could still be read, and under it she copied the line from Laveen: ONE FRONT, ONE VALLEY FLOOR. At 08:15 it went to Aguirre, 63, 150, Delfina and 226's counsel in the same minute. Nobody read mail on the first. That was fine. It was dated.
Abuela came in shaking the cold off her rebozo, looked at the struck line, and said in Spanish that a woman who corrects herself on New Year's will spend the whole year correcting herself. Lourdes ladled her a bowl and didn't argue.
On Monday she called Records at nine, because Aguirre had said January and it was January.
"You're going to ask me if anyone picked it up."
"Yes."
"Licensee 188. Fermín Robles. Sponsorship form Saturday at 11:52, through the portal." Paper moved. "The intake agent stamped it CONFLICT: SELF-DECLARED and routed it to my desk instead of the queue, which is the first useful thing that agent has done since it was installed. He attached the statement without being asked. Five of the same-holder OVERLAP nights in the December audit are his. His Rodríguez crew. He says a rule that only gets sponsored by people with nothing riding on it never gets sponsored."
In December 188 had written her one line, You know what this does to my Rodríguez nights, and she had written back, Yes. That's why it's on page one.
"He's not wrong," she said.
"He's not wrong, and he's not clean, and he said both before I could. Records will note his interest on the face of the proposal. The Leyva ledger stays sealed. If the board takes it up on the nineteenth, it gets opened in front of them, with 188 in the room. Not you."
"Not me."
"You withdrew. You don't get to come back as an audience." It wasn't unkind. The State Board had docketed counsel's referral on the thirtieth, Aguirre said. A letter would come by Wednesday with three questions: whether she had read the ledger, whether she had passed on anything in it, and who else had known she went. She had twenty days to answer in writing. "Answer on the twentieth day, after you've reread everything you've sent anyone since the twelfth. Records will send the Board your disclosure and the intake slip itself. They'll want them from us."
"And the correction."
"Third amendment in fourteen days. Counsel's already counted. But you said it helped 63 before anyone else could, and you left the old one struck instead of gone. They go in the packet side by side. The board can see which way it went." A pause. "Measure TB-09 on Wednesday like you said you would. If those nights are still grey on the nineteenth, it'll be because the water said so, not because nobody went."
On the back of the airport table she wrote: 188 SPONSORS (DISCLOSED). BOARD LETTER ~1/6, 20 DAYS. DO NOT CALL 188. Under that, smaller: DO NOT LOOK UP HIS NIGHTS.
The Grand Canal at 43rd Avenue was high and brown on Wednesday evening, moving fast enough to hear. TB-09 was a brass disc in a pier on the north bank, nine metres from the water at full stage. SRP's watermaster, Marta Iribe, met her at the headwall in a reflective vest over a church sweater.
"You're the one doing it for free."
"The stage request was ninety-five dollars. I paid it."
"So, almost free."
She put one head on the pier and the other on the street base at Indian School, six hundred metres from any water. This generation of head logged pressure on its own, so for the first time on a managed-water base she had the sixth column from the start, on both instruments.
At 21:00 Marta keyed the check, and the water didn't drop all at once. It sagged, then ran off downstream, and the canal went from loud to a hiss. By 23:30 the gauge read 0.19 metres, down from 1.61. The pier head drifted down after the stage and the reference didn't move. Pressure rose four-tenths of a hectopascal over the night, about a tenth of a microGal. With the street head recording at the same minutes six hundred metres away, the pressure and the tide cancelled in the pier-minus-street difference anyway. The difference didn't need the sixth column. But now each head could show it on its own, and on a historical night with one head that was the only thing that would.
At one in the morning she fitted it across nine steps: 2.4 µGal per metre, give or take 0.3, from 0.19 to 1.61 metres. That was lower than TB-14's 3.6, which made sense, because the pier sat farther back and the canal section was wider here.
Then she didn't pack up. The open water had gone in two and a half hours, but the pier stood in the bank, and the bank had been soaking for a week at full stage. She left both heads running and slept in the cab with the alarm set for each hour. At 06:00, with the gauge flat at 0.19 since midnight, the pier-minus-street column was still sinking: another 0.3 µGal since one o'clock and not done. Wet soil under the pier, draining slower than the canal. The 2.4 was a coefficient for a fast drawdown. A night when the canal had sat at one stage for a week, or had just been refilled after a dry-up, could carry a different load in the bank at the same gauge reading. It still had to be measured, and it was only partly measured.
TB-09 GRAND CANAL: 2.4 ± 0.3 µGAL/M, 1/6/49, 0.19–1.61 M. THRESHOLD ~0.42 M BETWEEN TIES. OUTSIDE RANGE: NOT MEASURED. COEFFICIENT FROM A 2.5 H DRAWDOWN; BANK STORAGE NOT INCLUDED (TAIL STILL MOVING AT 06:00). NIGHTS WITHIN 48 H OF A DRY-UP OR REFILL: NOT RESOLVING.
"So any night we moved less than forty centimetres, you're fine," Marta said.
"Any night the stage log shows less than forty centimetres. If there's a log."
There was one thing on her phone she didn't open. In the December audit list, two of 188's OVERLAP nights were tied to TB-09. She knew that much from the base column. She didn't open the dates. And she didn't fit anything until the custody was out of her hands. At 23:40 Marta had signed and timed the stage printout on the headwall, and both heads' raw files had gone from SRP's laptop to Records under SRP's name, so the numbers were filed by someone who wasn't her before she touched them. The fit and the 06:00 tail went to Aguirre at 06:20 as her reading of files Records already held. Records could run 188's nights. She wouldn't.
When Marta had gone, the canal bed shone under the streetlight in long wet plates, and a heron stood in the last of the water as if somebody had told it to wait.
On Saturday Ysabel's pickup pulled in behind the truck and stayed running, and Adán got out by himself, which he never did. He had a manila folder. In it were licensee 233's crew sheets for two Saturday nights in December, the 19th and the 26th, at $25 an hour. ROD: A. MONTAÑO (CONTEMPORANEOUS) was typed at the top of each. The station heights were in pencil.
"He wrote those after," Adán said. "In the truck at the end. He read them off the level's memory, so they're probably right. But I didn't see them go on the sheet at the stations." There was a form, a holder affidavit, that 233 said the board would want on the nineteenth. It said Adán had been there and held the rod, which he had. It also said the sheet was a true record made at the time.
"Was it?"
"Not the heights."
Abuela's radio was playing a Saturday Mass from somewhere in Sonora. Lourdes kept her hands off the folder. She had withdrawn. She was nobody's advisor on the holder-side rule, and Adán was seventeen and on a payroll that wasn't hers.
"I can't tell you who to work for," she said. "I can tell you what I do with my own sheets. I sign what I saw. I write the time I signed it. If something went on later, I write LATER next to it, and when."
"He'll be mad."
"Maybe. Or he'll get a better sheet out of it. 'Probably right' and 'made at the time' are different lines on that form."
He looked at the folder a long time. Then he took a blue raffle pen out of his hoodie pocket and wrote in the margin of the first sheet, small, in block capitals, because he had seen hers:
HEIGHTS ENTERED AFTER, FROM LEVEL MEMORY, ~05:10. A.M.
"Is that how?"
"That's how you'd do it. I didn't tell you to."
"You didn't tell me to," he agreed, and the corner of his mouth moved.
Ysabel lifted two fingers off the wheel at her through the windshield, which from Ysabel meant thank you and also don't. On the fridge calendar, under the ninth, Lourdes wrote: A.M. CAME. DID NOT READ 233'S SHEET. TOLD HIM WHAT I DO. Then she struck TOLD and wrote SAID.
Lateral 8 was narrow and fast between concrete walls, with cotton stubble on one side and a distribution warehouse on the other that kept its lights on all night, its yard tugs crossing the dock apron in pairs and stopping politely for each other at the painted lines. TB-22 was set in the headwall itself, two metres from the water. Marta came again, because SRP sent whoever had done the last one. "Two in a week. People are going to talk."
The gate dropped the lateral at 20:30, from 1.12 metres to 0.08 by 22:40. At 02:30 she fitted it: 3.1 µGal per metre, give or take 0.4. A narrower ditch, a closer slab, a bigger number. The threshold came to about a third of a metre between ties.
She slept three hours. At seven she opened the SRP stage archive for Lateral 8, which she had pulled two weeks earlier and not opened. Without a coefficient the logs would only have been something to stare at, and she hadn't wanted to stare.
On 17 June 2041 the stage read 0.94 at the evening tie and 0.90 at the late one. Four centimetres at 3.1 was about a tenth of a microGal. Sky Harbor was steady. The tie offsets matched the January table for 226's head to within 0.6. ONE HEAD.
On 2 August 2043, in the monsoon, the stage read 0.88 at 19:00. Then: STATION COMM LOSS 19:42–23:51. A storm had taken the radio. When it came back the lateral read 0.61. The archive's own assistant had drawn a dotted line across the gap and offered, in a pale box beside it, INTERPOLATE (LINEAR, CONFIDENCE 0.71)? She closed the box. A straight line between two numbers four hours apart wasn't a measurement of the water. Somewhere in those four hours the water had dropped at least 0.27 metres, maybe further and back up again, and nobody had written down when. Sky Harbor showed an outflow, +3.4 hectopascals at 21:00, and the late tie was at 21:20, inside the same hour. Amendment 1 had no stage for the interval and Amendment 2 had no direction. NOT RESOLVING, now for two reasons instead of one.
TABLE NOW: ONE HEAD 7. TWO HEADS 2. NOT RESOLVING 2.
In September, with nothing, she had guessed seven. Now it was seven. The guess still wasn't evidence of anything, and she left it out of the note.
It went at 07:40 to Aguirre, 226's counsel, 63, 150 and Delfina. Not to 188. Records could tell him.
Pablito answered first, at 07:52, for his aunt. So they did it seven times.
She typed: One head on seven nights. It doesn't say who carried it. She deleted the second sentence. Then she put it back, because it was true, and because counsel would need it as much as anyone.
Abuela's radio said rain on Thursday. Lourdes wrote THU RAIN on the fridge calendar under the fourteenth, and then, because she couldn't help it, LOG PRESSURE.