The float well of the old ferry office was an eight-sided shaft carved into the riverside foundation wall, four feet across. He dropped twenty feet straight down into the black water of the river basin. Its lower walls were lined with slimy green cut stone. There, three ages of town water levels had left nested rings of dried river silt and iron rust. The air inside the shaft was cold, humid, and smelled of decaying river lichen, stale grease, and wet limestone dust.
Pella Rook stood on a timber walkway spanning the mouth of the shaft. She held a tuned wooden rule in her left hand and a flat brass check mirror in her right. The mirror caught the dying afternoon light from the boat ramp door, directing a yellow beam down into the dark well. Twelve feet below, floating on the black, oily surface of the water, was the copper-cased float. It was eighteen inches across, shaped like a flattened pumpkin, made of seasoned white pine clad in thin sheet copper with soldered seams.
From the center of the float rose an upright ash rod, marked off in inches with notches burned into the wood with a hot iron. High above her head, perched on the oak collar beams of the office ceiling, Eren Tal sat straddling an eight-inch floor beam. He had the braided iron cable wrapped once around his gloved forearm, his wrench resting on the clamping block that secured the fourteen-pound iron billet in its upright…
