By noon the shop had turned into a fight. Fenn worked fast, the way he always had, tying off a net seam and moving to the next before the knot cooled. Maren worked slow, every stitch even, every pull the same weight. The trouble was they kept touching each other's work. Fenn found a sail Maren had started and finished it his way. She pulled the stitches out and did it hers. He redid it. She redid it. The salt kept drying the canvas stiff while they argued with their needles. "Leave my seams," Maren said. She did not look up. "You leave mine." Fenn dropped the sail on the bench between them. "We've fixed the same three feet of canvas twice. The rest is rotting." She held up her half. "Mine will hold ten years. Yours will hold one." "One is enough if the other pile survives the week." They both went quiet. The mountain had not shrunk. Fenn saw it plain now: two good hands working against each other were worse than one hand alone. The door scraped. A teenage boy stood there with red hair and ink-stained fingers, holding a torn boot he had clearly been handed on the street. "Someone stopped me," the boy said. "Said you fix things. I told him I don't. He gave it to me anyway." He set the boot down like it burned him. This was Kieran, the library page strangers could never seem to walk past. Behind him came a girl with a braid and a leather pouch at her belt. She stepped past Kieran without a word and picked up the sail off the bench. Her fingers found the seam, tested the tension, read both styles in one touch. This was Maera, who had sewn a burial shroud in a night and still could not get the Guild to open its door. "Two hands, two ways," Maera said. "That's your problem." She looked at Fenn. "Split it. Don't share it." Fenn understood at once. He stopped trying to make Maren work fast. He dragged the labeled crates from the wall and lined them up. "Wet canvas is yours," he told Maren. "All of it. No one touches your stitches. Boots and small tears go here." He turned to Kieran. "You can't say no on the street. Say yes in here. Sort the piles. Finished goes in the marked crates, unfinished stays out." Kieran looked at the crates, then at the door he could not seem to escape. "I can sort," he said. "I stamp return dates all day. Same thing." Maera claimed the small tears and the torn boot. Maren bent to her canvas alone, and no one reached for it. By dusk the wet pile was half gone. One crate held finished work, stacked and dry. They had lost the whole morning to redone stitches. But the salt had stopped winning. The system held. Now they only had to feed enough hands to keep it running before the next tide came in.