Chapter 10: The Morning Ticking

Tomas left on the Saturday rail cart.

Maren did not go to the station to see him off. They had agreed the night before: simple, undramatic, the way their first departure had not been. He would take the morning cart north to the junction, then conventional transport from Koper. She would do her morning shift. They would not make a scene of it.

She found out later, from Lina, that he had stood at the rail platform for a few minutes before the cart arrived, looking at the settlement from below. Lina said he'd seemed like he was counting something.

The pill case was on the shelf in her kitchen, next to the chipped cup. She had put it there the night before, after Tomas had gone to the guest quarters. It sat between the cup and a jar of dried rosemary, white and flat and clean, and it looked precise and foreign and slightly too smooth.

She did not open it. She did not move it. She left it where it was and went to bed and slept, and the darkness was total, and the ticking measured the hours. The pills sat on the shelf in the dark.

Saturday morning. The phosphorescent panels were dead. The pre-dawn was cold. November was coming back around; nineteen years since the convoy had pulled out of the Institute's loading area. Eleven years since the last letter. And now he had come himself and said what no letter could say and left the question on her shelf in a blister pack.

She dressed in the dark. She found her boots by feel. She went outside.

The cranking station was not yet open; the Saturday shift started later than weekdays, because Saturday was the day the gravity battery was allowed to run lower before the winding, which gave the gear train a longer descent period and the workshop an uninterrupted morning of power for the heavier tasks. Petra had designed it this way and was proud of it, which she expressed by not talking about it, which was how you knew.

Maren walked the hillside path. The bay was gray. A fishing boat was already out, its sail a pale triangle against the water. The sailing argument was still unresolved. She suspected it always would be. She missed Josip, briefly. He would have had something to say about unresolvable arguments.

The air smelled like salt and cold stone. Below the path, someone's goat had gotten into the terrace garden again; she could see the evidence in a row of half-eaten chard. This was an ongoing problem that the settlement council had discussed three times and not resolved, primarily because the goat belonged to Anja, and Anja's position on goat management was that the goat was an autonomous agent and the chard should have been better defended. Nobody had yet found a counterargument that Anja couldn't dismiss by pointing at the goat and shrugging.

Maren smiled. The goat was eating chard.

The cranking station opened at eight. Maren took her place at station nine. The window showed the bay, the same bay she'd been looking at for eighteen years, which was never the same bay twice because the light changed and the wind changed and the boats changed and the color of the water changed and the only thing that didn't change was the fact of it being there, which was enough.

She set her resistance to six. The station smelled like metal oil and the cold stone of the floor. She gripped the handles. They were cold from the night; nobody had cranked yet. She was first.

She pulled.

The resistance caught. The gears meshed. The gravity battery took the load. The chain tightened, and somewhere in the shaft that Petra had cut into the hillside, the thirty-tonne limestone block began, imperceptibly, to rise.

The sound came first: the click of the escapement releasing, the low groan of the chain under tension, the particular frequency of the gear train that Petra had spent her life refining and that sang a note, in certain conditions, that you could feel in your teeth. Then the resistance in her shoulders, the engagement of her back, the warmth that started in her forearms and spread upward like a tide finding its level. Her breathing deepened. Her heart rate settled into the rhythm it had been trained for over eighteen years of mornings.

Other crankers arrived. Filip at his station, level ten, silent and focused. The elderly woman at station three, whose name was Vesna, whose knees worked, whose mornings were her own. A young couple who had arrived from the forge settlement last month and who cranked side by side with the particular synchrony of people who had recently discovered each other. Lina, who was not required to crank as an apprentice but who did anyway.

The station filled. Seventeen stations, then nineteen, then all twenty; Saturday brought a fuller shift. The gear train hummed. The flywheel whirred. The gravity battery groaned and rose.

Maren cranked. Her body did what it had done every morning for eighteen years. The battery rose.

At forty-five minutes, something changed. Her breathing stopped being a decision. Her hands stopped gripping and started holding. The boundary between her arms and the crank handles blurred — not numb, the opposite of numb, a sensitivity so complete that she could feel the grain of the metal, the tooth profiles meshing, the weight of the limestone block twenty meters below her shifting on its chain. She breathed. She turned.

After her shift, she put out the phosphorescent panels. She ate breakfast: bread, tomatoes, olive oil, an egg, strong tea from Josip's thermos. She sat at her kitchen table, where the morning light came through the window and caught the limestone shelves on the hillside, and the panels on the south-facing racks were beginning to glow as they charged, and the bay was turning from gray to blue as the sun found it.

The pill case was on the shelf. The chipped cup was next to it. The rosemary was on the other side.

She looked at them for a while. Three objects. A chipped cup from a market in Koper. A jar of rosemary from the garden. A pill case, white and smooth.

She did not open the case. She did not throw it away.

She finished her tea. She washed the cup. She put it back on the shelf, next to the pills and the rosemary, and she went to work.

Outside, the ticking continued. The gravity battery descended. The settlement wound through its Saturday. Children played on the energy-capture climbing frames, their weight on the platforms compressing springs that fed into the workshop's tool bank. A gearwright's apprentice argued with Petra about tooth profiles, which was brave and probably inadvisable. The fishing boat with the patched sail tacked across the bay. Anja's goat found more chard.

Maren walked down the hillside to the records hall. The morning was warm.