The channels were set. Now they had to be folded.
Setting a channel was laying it out: placing the root and the seam and the crown so that a path existed through the metal from the heart’s center to its edge. Folding was making the path permanent. Each fold drew the metal over and around the channel, layer on layer, so that the channel’s walls grew thick and strong and the channel itself stayed open, a clean bore through the folded mass, like the bore through a valve. Notebook II called for nine folds. Mara had done one, on the cold plate in the lowest chamber, before Caldris came. Now she began the rest, in the fixture, in the cradle, under the pulse.
The cradle stood beside the fixture on the platform now; Orison had moved it there in the night, sliding it along the walkway on rails Mara had not known were in the floor. She stepped into it. The rests met her at shoulder and hip and knee. The gauge and its second readout hung on the wall where Sera could see them. The threshold page hung beside them. Sera stood behind the cradle with the rescue line in one fist and the readout in her other hand.
