The official quench signal came onto the display as a clean blue line.
It drew itself across the glass wall from left to right, slowly, a pulse: a long flat stretch, a rise, a peak, a fall, a long flat stretch, a rise. Over and over, steady as a ruler. It was beautiful in the way a perfectly laid weld bead is beautiful, every rise the same height, every fall the same depth, every interval exactly the length of the one before. Below it, in the corner of the display, the Compact’s star circle glowed, and beside the star circle a small line of script that Orison translated without being asked: Official signal. Lorn. For quench.
“That’s the pulse,” Orison said, from the control room’s ceiling. “The official one. Sent down from the lattice. When the heart is ready, it is to be quenched in time with that line. The cold opens on the rise and closes on the fall.”
Mara stood in front of the glass wall and watched the blue line rise and fall.
Then she knelt.
She knelt on the control room’s floor, by the glass wall, and laid her palm flat on the floor plates. The floor was the drum’s upper walkway, and the walkway was bolted to the drum’s frame, and the drum’s frame was bolted to the lamp, and the heart hung in the middle of all of it. Through her palm, through the metal, faint and deep, she could feel it: the heart’s…
