At the halfway mark, the third screw stopped.
Mara felt it before she saw it, through the frame, through the floor under her boots. The rhythm had been steady for twenty steps: call, quarter, done, four clicks above as the catches dropped. Crew one, crew three, crew two, crew four. She had stopped thinking about it. Her body was keeping it, the way it kept the eight-second count in the growth.
Then crew three’s call did not come.
“Crew three,” Sen said again.
Hollis and Joren had both hands on the crank. Mara could see their arms in the lamplight, the muscles standing out. The crank did not move.
“It’s stopped,” Hollis said. “The thread. It won’t go.”
Mara looked at the level. Center. They had not moved it. Good.
The other three crews had stopped too. Nobody had turned past the call. Tavin’s rule hung from the frame’s center on its slate, SLOW CREWS SET THE SPEED, and the slowest crew now was crew three, with a screw that would not move at all. So everyone waited.
