Sixty-eight at the table, a hundred and forty at the bunk

Previously: a pipe cracked under the slates at Iratxeta is pushing generator fumes into half the house. Five of the nine have headaches.

Six days of diesel were left when Fani Quiroga, a twenty-eight-year-old geologist who had come up to Iratxeta to swap the sensors on the slope, asked permission to run the generator for forty minutes with all nine of them inside, breathing the very thing the device was going to measure.

"There's no other way," she said. "The sensor measures what's in the air now. With the engine off since half past seven yesterday, what's in the air now is what's left over, and what's left over doesn't tell me what you were breathing in your sleep."

Mercedes Arriaga, a retired justice of the peace who keeps the fuel accounts on the inside back cover of the signature book, rested the tip of her pencil.

"Forty minutes of engine is three and a third litres, at five litres an hour. Three and a third litres is a fifth of today's ration. Tell me what I'm buying with that. I'll take them out of yesterday evening's hour and a half, the one we never ran."

"You're buying a number," said Fani. "Right now we have five people with headaches and an argument. With a number we have a decision."

Ramiro Bouzas, forty-four, a boatbuilder, had been standing by the door since breakfast.

"We've already got the decision. Switch it off and go down."

"Go down which way," said Txomin Elordi, sixty-two, a shepherd who has carried the club's post up to Iratxeta since 1994. He didn't say it as a question.

Idoia Bergara, the warden of the refuge and an emergency nurse until 2019, cut it in half. She authorised the forty minutes on three conditions: the engine starts at eleven, all nine wait together in the kitchen, sitting still, and anyone who can't take it goes down to the woodshed, the only part of the house eight steps below the dining room and the one place where Ramiro's headache lifts, and nobody sleeps while it's running.

Aitor Sein, seventeen, a trainee warden and a guide's son, offered to stay in the small bedroom with the logger in his hand to watch the screen.

"No," said Idoia. "The device stays there on its own and we read the screen afterwards. You take the clock: you call out the minutes to me from the kitchen and you write down the time it starts and the time it stops."

Fani set the logger up on the long table. It is a box the size of a paperback, with three channels — temperature, humidity and an electrochemical sensor for carbon monoxide, the gas that comes off anything burning badly and has no smell at all — and a memory that saves one reading every ten seconds. She put fresh batteries in it from the slope-sensor box and left it stabilising for twenty minutes, which is what that board needs before its curve means anything.

At five to eleven she set it in the dining room, on the long table, at the height of a seated person's face. Twenty minutes in the dining room and twenty in the bedroom: that was as much as one device could do for two rooms.

The generator started at one minute past eleven. Aitor called out the time and Mercedes wrote it down. At twenty-one minutes past eleven Fani carried the box up to the small bedroom and hung it from the rail of the top bunk, Lena's, a hand's breadth from where her head sleeps.

Lena Bouzas, forty-one, a mountaineer and an anaesthetist, sat on the kitchen bench with her back against the wall and the corridor door shut with a rolled-up sack along the bottom. Sabino Amantegui, sixty-six, warden of that refuge from 1991 to 2022, sat opposite her with the foil blanket over his knees.

"Fourteen hours and two minutes," said Lena. "Ten twenty over the first four days, three twelve the day before yesterday and half an hour yesterday morning, until Idoia shut it down at half past seven. That's how much engine we've run with the pipe open. I got it from Idoia's notebook and from Casimiro's envelope."

"Fourteen oh two," Sabino repeated.

"And you knew on Tuesday at twenty to seven."

"I knew the pipe was open. I heard the eight of you in the kitchen, and I meant to plug it that same afternoon and give you the diesel back."

Mercedes closed the book with her finger inside it and looked at Sabino for the first time since she took his statement.

"You warned the club in the autumn of 2021. That's what you said yesterday."

"In writing. A two-page report, with a photograph of the overlap and the exact spot."

"And in 2022 they let you go."

"In May."

"Why?"

Sabino took as long to answer as he always did, which was less than it seemed.

"I don't know. I got a three-line dismissal. It gave the date, it said my services were appreciated and it gave a registry number. It didn't say why."

"Do you still have that paper?"

"At home, in Ochagavía. Not here."

Mercedes opened the book at the inside back cover, where she keeps the litres, and wrote something in the margin, sideways, in small letters. Then she said, without looking up, that a dismissal with a registry number is a dismissal tied to another document, and that a document that gets filed leaves a copy in some archive of the club.

Casimiro Lete, seventy-one, a veteran member who has come up to Iratxeta for thirty winters, spoke from the corner bench, where he was sitting with his hat on indoors.

"I don't fall asleep at eleven in the morning. In thirty years I have never fallen asleep at eleven in the morning."

The engine stopped at eleven forty-one. Aitor called out the time. Fani waited for the air in the corridors to move whatever it had to move, went up to the small bedroom, unhooked the logger from the bunk rail and came back to the kitchen holding it against her chest. She plugged the cable into the laptop she uses to download the slope-sensor data, which had thirty-one per cent of its battery left, and turned the screen so that all nine could see it at once.

The dining-room curve rose in a straight line and flattened out at eighteen minutes. The bedroom one, over the twenty minutes that followed, never flattened at all.

"Sixty-eight," said Fani. "Sixty-eight parts per million in the dining room, and it sat still there from eighteen minutes on: once the curve flattens, the number belongs to the room and not to the clock, and that is why it holds without the long hour I told you about yesterday. And a hundred and forty next to your bunk, Lena, in twenty minutes, and still climbing when we stopped the engine: that one isn't the ceiling, it's the floor."

Nobody asked whether that was a lot. Lena Bouzas stood up, put herself in front of the screen and said out loud the only thing that needed translating.

"The eight-hour limit for a place where people work is twenty parts per million, and the fifteen-minute peak is a hundred. There are a hundred and forty next to my bunk, and we have slept six nights in it."