She heard it before she saw it.
She had carried the ring back to the lowest chamber on its plate and set it on the bench to cool, and lain down on the grating beside the bench because her legs would not hold her, and Sera had sat against the wall with the log on her knee, and neither of them had spoken. The ring sat on the cold plate above Mara’s head. She could not see it from where she lay. She could hear the chamber: the valve’s thin hiss at a quarter open, the pipes ticking, Sera’s breathing.
Then a tick from the bench. Small. Sharp. Different from the pipes.
Then a thin high ring of sound, very faint, a single clean note like a wet finger on a glass, rising, holding, fading.
Mara sat up.
The ring sat on its plate. Grey, dull, bent at the join. She could not see anything wrong with it from where she sat. She got up, slowly, holding the bench edge, and bent over it with the hand lamp, close, and turned the plate a little so the light came across the band at a low angle.
There. A line. Fine as a hair, dark, running through the grey.
