She finished the design while the first fold cooled.
It was a strange thing to do in the middle of a heart. The fold lay on the cold plate, its first channels open, waiting for the second fold and the third and all the rest; the bins sat on the grating with their crown and seam and Sera’s root; the inspection was coming, from somewhere, at some hour. And Mara sat at the end of the bench with the folder at the back of her notebook and wrote the instructions for a tool so that someone else could build it.
She did it because Tavin had asked. She did it because the clamp had filled a bin of root iron while she slept, and because Sera’s hands had done it, and because the old rule had said Sera’s hands should not have been allowed to. She did it because, if she died in the cradle, or the shell collapsed, or the inspection took the harvest, the clamp would still exist on a page.
She wrote it plain, in short lines, one instruction to a line, the way the household pages were written. The stop rule first, underlined, the way Sera had said. Then the frame, the legs, the warning to check that the legs were equal. Then the pad. Then the jaws, the sensor, the zero, the reading order. Lift. Hold. Seat. Out. She drew the frame, small, in the margin, the tongs and the hinge and the sensor, with…
