Mara worked on the frame plate in chalk while Eshel’s bypass sketch hung beside it.
The frame plate was a sheet of iron bolted to the Quiet Forge’s outer hall wall, as tall as a door, where the old hands had chalked their working drawings for a century. Most of it was covered in old marks, faded to ghosts. Mara had wiped a space clear with a wet rag and was drawing the swap.
Eshel’s sketch was pinned to the wall beside it. A sheet of drafting paper with a path drawn on it in red: a bypass. Through the brace.
The problem was simple to say. The old heart had to come out of its housing. The replacement had to go in. And the bridge channel, which Tavin was easing from the old heart’s sleeve a quarter turn at a time, had to be carried across from one to the other without ever being disconnected. If the bridge was disconnected for even a moment, the lamps at its other end felt it as a shock.
So for the swap, the bridge’s load had to go somewhere else. Through a bypass. Eshel’s red path: from the bridge’s sleeve, through the four remaining segments of the brace, around the housing, to the replacement’s mount.
