THE ROOT UNDER THE COVER

At eight thirteen, Ilva's authorisation had thirty-nine hours remaining. She went out with the flow lens clipped to her uniform, followed the branch line from the cabinet on the corner and found the first junction under a protective plate that the dry grass was already pushing through. Nael walked behind, putting less weight on the bad leg. Before the drilling surveys, he used to pass that way to reach the field where he played football with Antônio. There was a termite mound covered in small flowers between the street and the Lajes, and the players looked for the ball in the scrub without seeing their own ankles. The mine's earthworks had levelled the field. Then came the ducts, the tracking cameras and a grey crust over the earth, thin enough to get into the houses, thick enough that no flower came back. Ilva brought the lens close to the plate. The visor indicated continuity as far as the pumping point and a bend under the old field. The bend did not appear in the record released by Edna. We'll go over the top, she said. She took four steps. A swarm came out of the service cabinet bolted to the adobe wall and filled the air in front of them. The bees were small, black, stingless. They rose in a spiral, struck their faces and clung to the fabric of the uniform. Ilva backed into the middle of the street. Nael covered his head with his forearm and veered off to the porch of an empty house. No camera ordered the withdrawal. The two of them obeyed the bees. On the other side of the cabinet, a contract technician waited inside the band of shade cast by the roof. He carried optical tweezers and a sealing ring inside a transparent capsule. The correct part had been unavailable for eleven weeks, and that ring, salvaged from a condemned pump, cost more than three days of his work. The alloy that kept heat away from the contacts had learned to respect borders before the men who extracted it. I won't open it with them there, said the technician. The swarm went in through a crack by the cabling. Some bees came back loaded with dark mud. Nael followed the flight to a narrow ditch behind the house, where the earth kept a damp strip under leaves powdered by the ore. They're looking for material, he said. Ilva put the lens away. They went down into the ditch, pushing hard branches aside with their legs. The planned work would end at the cabinet, but the bees had traced another branch line, made of mud carried between their mandibles. Every twenty steps one of them appeared low to the ground. Then two. Then a low cloud over a technical cover hidden under tree bark. Juvenal, a people's lawyer who sent petitions until they vanished into the filing systems, passed on the road with his face turned to a voice hearing. He saw the two of them in the ditch, slowed his pace and went on speaking quietly. The cover protected an old junction. A buriti root had grown underneath and lifted one of the edges two fingers above the soil. The metal compressed the root, which widened all the same, yellow where it had lost its bark. Through the gaps came enough moisture for the bees, three drops a minute, absorbed before reaching the surface. Nael crouched. This buriti stood in the middle of the field. Only the root was left. The trunk had been cut when the operation opened a way for the concentrate vehicles, but under the plate the root had advanced until it found the pipe. Growing, it had displaced the junction. The bees turned the buried loss into a wall for their own colony. Ilva removed the cover with his help. The main pipe went on to the lower village. A narrower conduit left the junction, passed under the road and pointed towards the yard where the crushing plant washed its conveyor belts. The surface of the diversion was colder than that of the household branch. Water was running there at that very moment. She clipped the lens back onto her uniform without using it. The technician arrived at the edge of the ditch, still holding the capsule. He looked at the pressed root, the bees and the narrow conduit. If I seal it, they lose the mud. If I cut the root, it opens again further down. Ilva asked for the tweezers. He did not hand them over. The order is at the cabinet. Nael touched two fingers to the pipe. The vibration rose steadily towards the crushing plant. He knew that note from when he guided the first machines through the valley, paid by the metre opened. He pressed his mouth shut, as he used to in the days when pointing out a bend paid more than asking where it led. The bees came down over the exposed junction. They covered the metal edge, went into the crack and forced the three of them up out of the ditch. The repair stayed open. The diverted water went on running. Up top, Ilva cleaned the mud off her boots and looked at the road that skirted the licensed polygon. The authorisation allowed her to go only as far as the junction. She unclipped the flow lens from her uniform and handed it to the technician. Then she tightened the straps of her boots, first the left, then the right. Nael was already moving off along the forbidden road when he heard her steps catch up with his.