Her name was Sora.
She offered it the next morning, when Ryu was on his back under the northeast corner rerouting the drain line, and she delivered it with the specific tone of someone granting a concession they hadn't fully decided to grant yet. She crouched at the edge of the crack in the floor, watched him work, and said it once, clearly, the way you say a word to someone who is going to need to hear it more than once.
"Sora," Ryu repeated, without stopping work.
She made a sound that was apparently correct pronunciation confirmed.
He kept working. She kept watching. After ten minutes of this she picked up a length of copper pipe he hadn't reached yet, examined the fittings on both ends with the focused interest of someone who had never seen the object but understood the principle immediately, and set it back down in the precise order he needed it. Without being asked.
Ryu filed this information.
"How far does it go?" he asked. "Below."
A pause while she decided how much that question deserved. She spread her hands, a gesture that managed to suggest significant lateral distance without specifying it.
"Far," Aine translated from behind him, which was startling because he hadn't heard her arrive.
He looked back. Aine was standing at the chamber entrance with the morning's accounting ledger already open, pencil moving. She didn't look up.
"You speak Fuchizo?" Ryu asked.
"Enough. Old trade language. My grandmother sold herbs to the hill communities before Karashima's father closed the border." She turned a page. "Sora says the tunnels run from below this hill to the eastern ridge and possibly further. She is being imprecise intentionally."
"Reasonable," Ryu said.
Sora looked at Aine. Then back at Ryu. She said something short.
"She says you are strange," Aine said.
"Also reasonable."
Sora's expression moved in a direction that on a human face would have been the first edge of a smile, controlled immediately. She stood, adjusted something on her clothing that Ryu registered as a vest made of material he couldn't identify, and dropped back through the crack in the floor with a silence that suggested the ability to move without sound was not incidental.
The crack sealed behind her. Not the stone closing. More like the space simply deciding it preferred not to be open.
Ryu finished the drain reroute, tested the slope with a thin line of water from his bottle, watched it move correctly toward the new exit point, and lay still for a moment looking at the ceiling of the bath chamber above him.
One month, he thought.
The ceiling didn't comment.
The soft launch was Aine's idea and Ryu's reluctant concession.
"You're not ready for a full open," she said at the morning briefing, which was the four of them standing around the drain channel because there was nowhere to sit yet. "You have no towels, no pricing board, no entry procedure, and Fumiko's changing partition is held up by optimism and one nail."
"Two nails," Fumiko said.
"The partition is fine," Ryu said.
"Soft launch," Aine repeated. "Women from the village only. Twelve clients, invitation only. Today. We control the variables, observe the problems, and fix them before the word spreads far enough to bring people we can't manage."
Ryu looked at his bathhouse. The walls were solid. The floor was level. The copper pipe from vent to basin to soaking chamber was fitted, sealed, and carrying water at the correct temperature, which he had spent the previous evening verifying with his palm at every joint. The soaking chamber held water. The drainage channel drained.
It worked. He knew it worked. He had built things that worked his entire professional life.
"Fine," he said. "Twelve clients. Who?"
Aine had already written the list.
The first client was Misa the former laundress, who entered the changing room, stood in front of the partition, and began to cry before she had removed a single layer of clothing.
Ryu was outside. He heard it through the wall and looked at Fumiko with alarm.
"Good crying," Fumiko said, with the certainty of a woman who had catalogued the varieties.
He accepted this and went back to checking the pipe fittings on the outer wall.
The second and third clients arrived together, two farmers' wives who had apparently decided that facing the unknown was easier with company. He heard them go quiet when they reached the soaking chamber, the abrupt stop of conversation that happens when sensory experience overwrites language. Then a long exhale, drawn out and involuntary, the sound of a body releasing something it had been carrying so long it had forgotten the weight.
By the fifth client, Fumiko had stopped pretending to sort herbs and was standing in the corridor between changing room and soaking chamber with an expression Ryu had not yet seen on her face. Quiet. Almost reverent.
"What?" he asked.
"They keep making that sound," she said.
"What sound?"
She didn't answer, which was its own answer.
By midday all twelve had cycled through. Three had asked to come back tomorrow. One had asked if her mother could come. One had said nothing at all but had pressed two copper coins into Aine's hand with both of hers, which was not the agreed price but considerably more than it.
Aine came outside and stood next to Ryu and opened her ledger.
"Problems identified," she said. "The changing partition needs three more nails. The herb basket position means clients brush against it entering the soaking chamber and we will lose dried herbs to the water. The temperature in the soaking chamber drops in the eastern end furthest from the inlet pipe, which four of twelve clients noticed and two mentioned."
"I can extend the inlet line two feet. It'll even the temperature distribution."
"Do it today." She made a note. "The pricing. Two copper per session is what we discussed. Misa paid two. The others paid between one and four, based on apparently personal calculations I couldn't predict."
"Sliding scale," Ryu said.
Aine looked at him.
"Some pay more, some pay less, the total balances. It keeps the door open to people who can't afford a fixed price." He watched the eastern ridge, where the light was starting to angle toward afternoon. "Noble clients pay a different rate. Private sessions."
"You're thinking about noble clients already."
"I'm thinking about the Karashima Charter and what it costs to fight it legally. Noble clients who have used the bathhouse are clients with a personal interest in it staying open."
Aine was quiet for a moment, pencil suspended over the ledger. Then she wrote something. He couldn't see what.
"The temperature issue," she said. "Four of twelve noticed. That's a third of your clients identifying a quality problem on the first day."
"It'll be fixed before tomorrow."
"What's tomorrow?"
"Open launch." Ryu turned from the ridge. "Word is already traveling. Misa told someone before she reached the bottom of the hill, I could see her talking. By tomorrow morning there will be people at the gate before we open." He looked at the building, at the solid pale walls and the thin steady breath of steam from the vent behind it. "We either open and manage it, or we close and manage the rumors instead. The rumors are harder."
Aine considered this with the expression she used for calculations she hadn't finished yet.
"I'll need two more staff," she said finally.
"Talk to Tomoe. She knows the village."
"Tomoe knows everyone's business. It's not the same thing." But she was writing again.
He was under the soaking chamber extending the inlet line when Sora came back.
She didn't come through the floor this time. She came through a section of the outer wall that he would have sworn was solid limestone twenty minutes ago and was now, apparently, negotiable. She sat on the edge of the soaking chamber and looked at the water.
The water was clear. Mineral-warm. Faintly iridescent where the late light caught it.
Sora's amber eyes tracked the surface. She reached out and put one hand in, just to the wrist. Held it there.
Ryu kept working on the inlet line. He had learned, over four days, that Sora communicated more in the gaps between things than in the things themselves.
After a while she said something. Short, two syllables, directed not at him but at the water.
He looked at Aine, who had come in to supervise the extension work and was now watching Sora with an expression he hadn't seen on her face before. Something careful. Something that might have been the early shape of recognition.
"What did she say?" Ryu asked.
Aine was quiet for a moment.
"She said," Aine began, then stopped. Tried again. "The closest translation is something like. 'It's still here.' " She paused. "I think she means the spring. I think the Fuchizo knew this water before we found it."
Ryu looked at Sora, who had both hands in the water now, her copper horns catching the last light coming through the vent opening, her eyes closed.
He finished the inlet extension. Checked the seal. Pressed his palm to the pipe and felt the water moving through it, warm and consistent and running from somewhere deep and old.
He thought about Goro's word. Fuchi no Yama. Depth-mountain. Named for what was below, not what was above.
He thought about a village that had forgotten the name meant something.
He thought about twelve women who had made a sound he hadn't heard before and didn't have a word for yet.
Tomorrow the door opened to everyone.
He tightened the last fitting and said nothing about any of it.