She finished the shaping with the field’s jaws moved in small increments, after the spiral, in the hour before the quench.
The spiral had brought the heart to its curve. But a curve was not a finished heart. The channels inside it had to be brought to their final bores now, their exact widths, the widths she had drawn on the design page from the load sheet. The field could do that too. If she closed the tongs on the heart’s outer face directly over a channel and pressed, very gently, in small increments, the field would push the face in by a fraction and the channel’s bore beneath it would narrow by as much. If she pressed the faces on either side of a channel, the bore would widen. She worked around the heart that way, channel by channel, a press here, a press there, each one tiny, and after each press she shifted the grease marks on the design page to show where the bore had moved.
The school. The hospital. The third floor. She brought each one to its drawn width and checked it with the cradle’s sensors, which read the bores through the metal as Orison relayed them, and wrote each reading in ink beside the plan.
