For thirty minutes, the only sounds in the communal kitchen were the scratching of iron nibs on rag thick parchment, the rhythmic clack of the tram dispatch swinging weight. The low, nonstop bubbling of the chicory cooking pot on the banked hearth.
Len, Ivara, and Bram worked shoulder to shoulder beneath the emerald glare of the central lantern. She turned Consulting Engineer Ansett Rill’s theoretical formulas into the hard, unforgiving measurements of field mechanics. Beside them, Doma Reel sat on an overturned flour barrel, a short stub of carpenter’s chalk in her hand. That kept a running tally of town resources on the whitewashed face of an oak pantry door.
“Rill’s deactivation blueprint assumes an open heat discharge into the lower river basin,” Ivara said. Her brass rule slid across a table of logarithmic spreading coefficients. “He calculated that forty-eight thousand units of solar heat could be vented directly into the river channel over four hours. The water volume would rise by twenty-four inches, the heat would increase by two point two degrees. The excess steam would scatter safely into the mountain clouds.”
She tapped her thumbnail against the margin where Deren Vey had written his corrections seven years earlier.
