Tavin overrode the switch.
He did not ask. He looked at Mara once, across the chamber, and then he put his other hand on the lever beside the first and threw his weight against the latch.
The latch was locked from outside, from the chorus’s end, through Cant’s wall. It held. But Tavin was not trying to throw the lever. He was holding it. Holding it closed, in the connected position, against the latch that wanted to open it. Every time the chorus’s relay tried to pull the brace off the heart, the latch strained against the lever, and Tavin’s weight held the lever down.
The housing blistered.
Mara saw the steel around the lever bubble and darken as the relay inside fought him. A smell of hot metal. A thin wisp of smoke from the housing’s seams. Tavin did not let go. His face was grey and set and his bad knee was braced against the wall, and he held the lever.
Around the heart, the brace held too. But at a cost.
The outer joints began to glow. The two outer segments, the tannery’s and the Coil Stair’s, where the brace’s frame met the shear: their bolted joints went dull red, then brighter. The brace was holding on without its governor, which the chorus had locked, and the load was going into the joints instead of the pocket. Mara watched the red spread along the joint lines. The bolts would melt. Then the segments would shed. Tavin was…
