At one-twelve in the afternoon, Tom Carver emerged from the upper arcade exit into the museum gallery, soaking wet and panting for breath. But holding an oiled thick parchment dispatch slip securely clamped inside his brass tobacco tin. He laid the tin on the table before Pella Rook.
“From Mistress Saye and Mistress Morland,” Carver panted, wiping yellow mud from his chin. “They wouldn’t let me leave with a spoken message. Jo sat down on a tool box and wrote it out with an ink-pencil, and Ada co-signed it with her thumb-stamp.”
Pella opened the tin and unfolded the damp paper. In Jo’s neat, elegant copperplate hand, written on the back of an envelope that had contained a gas bill from Harrowby, ran the precise, checked accounting: Sleeve Beta holding at bone-crushing pressure. Seams sound. Third Gate throat open six turns. Capacity leftover: 12,000 GPM for next twenty minutes. You may release the next memory pulse, provided peak pressure doesn’t exceed bone-crushing pressure. Don’t rush. We’re holding the floor.
Pella touched the blue ink, feeling the huge, grounding reality of the words. It wasn’t a vague shout through a storm. It was an audited statement of capacity. “She gave us the numbers, Corvin,” Pella said, her face brightening with quiet confidence. “Twelve thousand gallons of margin. We can resume the uncoupling.”
