The first fold of a heart began on the cold plate in the lowest chamber, with three bins open on the grating and a design page weighted flat under Tavin’s wrench.
Mara had not slept again. She had eaten, because Sera made her: a square of the hard biscuit from Tavin’s packet, not the soft, and a cup of water, which Sera logged on the crate lid. Then she had laid out the work.
A heart’s first section, nothing more yet: the core of it, where the load channels would begin. Notebook II called it the first fold. Lay the root first, at the center, where the stress will gather. Lay the seam over it, wherever a channel must turn or a load must change. Lay the crown outside, along the faces that carry no flex. Fold them together so that each grade lies where it is fit. Do not close the channels. Every fold wants to close. A closed channel is a dead channel.
She laid the root. Sera’s crystals and her own, the dense dark heavy ones, at the center of the cold plate, in a small tight mass. She warmed them the slow way, the torch far back, until the mass took on its faint sheen and its deep note came up warm. She laid the seam over it, the pliant crystals, in a pattern she had drawn on the design page from the load sheet: here a channel turning toward the hospital’s third floor, here one…
