The claw hammer made a dry, splintering shriek as Jonah Price drew the first four-inch framing nail from the wall.
Mara stood in the doorway of the daylight workshop, holding the equipment register in both hands. The room had smelled of fresh pine shavings and clean linseed oil only three days ago, when Noah had finished planing the last of the four demonstration workbenches. Now, the autumn frost was creeping through the uninsulated windowpanes, turning their breath to white vapor as they worked by the gray light of early morning.
Along the north wall ran thirty feet of polished three-quarter-inch copper bus-bar, fastened to the studs with porcelain stand-off insulators. It was the backbone of the guest-training installation they had built five days earlier—the physical conduit that delivered low-voltage direct current to the practice soldering stations, the circuit testing rigs, and the water filtration demonstration bench.
“Mark each terminal before you cut,” Tessa called from beneath the central distribution box. She was lying on her back on the cold floorboards, an inspection mirror balanced on her chest, a pair of insulated wire snips gripped in her right fist. “If we nick the insulation on the return leads, the whole line shorts when we tie it into the clinic bank.”
