The old heart slid free along the track, and Mara felt it through the soles of her boots.
It was not a sound. Or not only a sound. The carriage moved on its rail, and the old heart moved with it, out of its seat in the housing where it had sat for longer than the Compact had existed, and the movement went down through the carriage into the rail and through the rail into the Quiet Forge’s floor and up through the floor into Mara’s feet. A long low grinding. Like a millstone turning once.
She stood at the frame rail with her right hand on it. Feeling it.
The old heart had been in that seat since before the Compact. Since before the Directorate, before the Low Brace, before the yard. It had held Hearth through the Founders’ generation and the long dimming after and the fifteen years in Halvek’s file and the day-nine cut. It had a white line across its face and a burr in its tone, and it was failing. And it was moving now, for the first time in centuries, out of the only place it had ever been.
Mara found she would rather not watch it go. She watched anyway.
