The sheet split past the twelfth hour.
Mara heard it over the link from Tal before anyone said anything. A sharp crack, high and thin, like ice on a pond. Then a rigger’s shout. Then the press’s motor stopping.
Mara was at the well’s screen with the bow on it. Eshel’s needle sat on the bow mark. The next spike was twenty minutes out. She had been listening to Tal with half her attention and watching the needle with the other half, and when the crack came she felt both halves snap together into one.
Then a voice, young, a woman’s, swearing. In Tal dialect. Mara did not know the words. She knew the tone.
“Stop,” Bren said. “Stop the press.”
The press had already stopped.
Mara checked the needle. Still on the bow mark.
The platform had reached the heart’s housing half an hour before, after forty minutes in the duct with Bren calling every ten centimeters and Anwen checking every reading from Lorn. The spike had passed while they were halfway down, the riggers holding the platform still on its ropes until the needle came back off the mark. The one after it was the one Mara was watching for now. The riggers had fitted the channel body to the housing’s port. They had begun lining it: laying the mirror iron sheets into the spiral’s inner face, one at a time, each cut to thirty-one degrees on the inspector’s mark, and pressing each one home with a small…
