Marcus Ironheart drove the iron point of his depth gauge into the mud at the edge of the old bridge and watched the brass dial spin past every safe reading. The needle kept falling. He pulled the shaft out, wiped it on his coat, and drove it in again three paces west. Same result. The ground under the old crossing had gone soft as wet bread. He had known it for a week. Testing it a fourth time did not change the fact that the bridge he meant to build here, the clockwork span that would finally close the gap across Vendetta Row, could not stand on this shore. He crouched by the water and flexed his steel fingers open and shut to warm the joints. The prosthetics clicked. He had earned them by miscalculating a load once, years back, and losing both hands under the beams. He had spent two years counting the jobs he could not take. He had counted this bridge among them long before he could hold a pencil again. No one had asked him to build it. He had drawn it himself, scraped up the money himself, and paid off a hostile guild with a contract for the eastern fittings he could barely afford. If the near shore would not hold the anchor, all of that ended today. He walked north along the bank until the ground felt different under his boots. Harder. He knelt and cut a wedge out of the pavement with a chisel and mallet, working slow because his grip was strong but not delicate. The slab came free in one piece. Black tar bound gravel in tight bands, and under the tar ran a seam of pale compacted stone he had not expected this close to the water. Old street, laid before the split, laid deep. He set the sample on a flat rock and drove the depth gauge down beside the hole he had cut. The needle stopped where he wanted it to stop. He drove it again. It stopped again. He tried a third spot and got the same reading. The near shore had failed him. This ground would not. Before the light went, he hauled a block of set concrete from his cart and dropped it at the spot. An iron spike stood out of the top, and a small tag hung from the spike stamped with his initials and the words that made the claim his. He hammered the block until it sat flush. The bridge would begin here now, not where he had drawn it, which meant the span would run longer, the wind load across the gap would climb, and the clockwork joints he had already ordered would not match the new geometry. He picked up the pavement sample and started back toward his shop to redraw everything before morning.