The first heavy pulse entered the manifold, and Mara put her palm flat on the frame.
She did it on purpose this time, with none of the habit’s reach in it, the hand going out on its own to listen for a note that would not come. She chose it. She stepped from the control desk to the inspection frame’s top rail, where it ran level with the chamber floor above the heart, and knelt, and laid her right palm on the cold iron, fingers spread.
The pulse came up through it.
It came as a shiver, with no tone in it. It started faint, a tremor in the iron under her palm like a cart passing in the street outside a house. Then it grew. It came up through the bones of her hand, through the wrist, into the forearm: a long rising vibration, steady, pressing, as the reservoir’s first heavy flow came down through the trunk’s inlet and divided at the forks and went out along the branches.
Her hand felt it. Her body felt it. Through her knees on the stone, through the soles of her boots.
She could not hear what it was.
The frame hummed.
