Lisan asked to see the replacement frame, and Caldris let him, and so in the late part of that long day Mara found herself on the drum’s platform with a Compact maintenance specialist kneeling by the frame and a guard standing at the drum door.
The replacement frame was the mounting the new heart would sit in when it was done: a cradle of pale alloy struts, bolted to the drum’s platform under the old heart, that Orison had unlocked for her after the coupon. She had begun preparing it while the first fold cooled. Its lower channel bolts, the ones that would hold the heart’s root against the platform, she had tightened by hand, by feel, with Tavin’s wrench. She had carried her tool tray out with her and set it on the platform beside the frame.
Lisan unpacked a torque wrench from his long case. The case, Mara saw when he opened it, held two things, a slim torque wrench in a fitted slot and, in a second slot beside it, something long and white that he did not take out. He closed the lid over the white thing before she could look at it properly.
He knelt at the frame, and the guard stood at the drum’s door, watching through the glass panel set in it.
