She did not reach for the third one at once. She made herself wait.
She hung on Sera’s rail at the edge of the fan with her arms aching and the line taut at her belt and her face a hand’s width from the frost, and she listened to all of them at once. The field of silver and grey in front of her, giving off its wind-through-wire hum, every crystal with its own note, the notes crowding together into a sound like a choir heard from a long way off.
She had listened to the first two crystals as if each had one note. A note she had to hold steady while she cut, the way she held a weld bead steady with the torch: keep it even, keep it level, don’t let it waver. And both times the note had climbed, and she had tried to hold it, pushed against it, and the crystal had died.
She chose a crystal near the base of the fan. A thick one, its branches short and heavy. She touched its base with the file’s tip, very lightly, and listened.
The note was lower than the others. Deeper. And as she held the file against it without cutting, she heard that it was not steady. It moved. Slowly. It drifted down, and down, the way a bell’s note drifts down as it fades.
