On its first full shift under load, Lorn’s new heart ran warmer than the forecast.
Mara noticed it in the morning, at the cradle, when she came down to take the readings. She had printed a forecast the night before, on the Tern’s roll printer, from the design page: what the heart’s temperature should be, channel by channel, hour by hour, for its first full day carrying all six loads, if everything she had drawn was right. She had pinned it beside the gauge on the cradle alcove’s wall, under the threshold page, so that the forecast and the real readings would sit side by side.
The real readings were higher.
A little, and nowhere near danger. The gauge sat at low yellow, where it had sat through the dawn. But when she read each channel’s figure off the sensor panel and laid it against the forecast’s line for the same hour, every one was a little higher than the forecast said. Every one. No single channel was running hot from overload; all six ran a little warm, together, as though the heart were sitting in a warmer room than she had drawn it in.
She checked the forecast first, before she blamed the heart. She reworked the arithmetic for the school’s channel on the back of the printout, from the load sheet, from scratch. The forecast was right. She went down the forecast line by line, channel by channel, hour by hour, comparing. The school’s channel: warm, by a…
