In Sister Merrow’s washroom, the clockwork gear-catch of the Courtesy Arch clicked through its twenty-second minute. Ada Morland had packed her Bourdon gauge and her notebook back into her canvas satchel, her left hand checking the buckle of her calfskin brace to ensure the leather hadn’t slipped.
On the pine table, Varo Nenn laid down an ancient balance scale of polished brass, its pans suspended by silk threads. From a wooden coin box, Pella drew a single silver coin. A heavy, unclipped coin minted fifty years ago under the old town charter, bearing the stamped impression of a river bridge and a bundle of wheat.
Nenn set the balance weights on the opposite pan: three brass discs totaling exactly three and two-tenths grams. The beam balanced perfectly, swinging with a slow, zero-drag glide above the ivory scale. ‘The wage is honest, Mistress Morland,’ Nenn pronounced, recording the transaction in the committee’s leather ledger. ‘One silver coin for twenty-four minutes of approved technical consultation, paid from the voluntary subscriptions of the Watermen’s Guild.’
Pella placed the silver coin on the brass threshold of the arch. The metal of the threshold warmed instantly. It glowed with a soft, amber deep ring as the coin was drawn across the space-folding boundary into Harrowby, where it settled with a soft, metal ring onto the steel workbench in front of Imran Bell.
