Hands on the Line

The repeater thrummed like a tired animal, a low, patient vibration that rode through Rowan Hale's boots into the damp straps of the harness. Dawn had come in a flat, metal-gray sheet, scraping the horizon with light the way a file would scrape a stubborn bolt. Rowan breathed out and tasted copper and the residue of old grease; both were as familiar as a name. Around them the pylon rose in sections of scavenged lattice, mismatched steel and salvaged composite, each panel a different weather and a different life. The whole thing belonged to the world like a patched coat, and Rowan's hands knew how to coax seams closed.

They moved the way someone who had practiced betrayal a thousand times would move—quick, deliberate, a rhythm learned from the work. Fingers found a corroded splice sleeve and stripped away a crust of mineral. The tools never complained. Rowan's wrench, nicknamed Ruth for reasons nobody in the hollow questioned, clicked once and then fit snugly. "You're in a generous mood today," Rowan muttered to Ruth and tightened a bolt with the sort of affection that was mostly professional code. There was a small, private humor in treating inanimate things like a rowdy crew at the dock. It kept loneliness from being tidy.

Below, the road unrolled like a scar through the scrub, rumpled by tires and the tracks of things that had been machines and were not any more. A weather vane far off, a rusted wind-harvester shaped like a hand, spun lazily; its blades had earned a habit of coughing out orange dust when the breeze chose to. People ate that dust in cities and pretended it wasn't part of their soup; Rowan had seen it dust the steps of a signboard where a council once posted notices. Culture was abrasion here—small rituals survived, like chewing a slice of dried fruit wrapped in paper when the heat cut the day in half, or the way children had renamed the migrating birds in three different towns so the birds sounded like jokes told poorly. These were not things Rowan belonged to, but they were the scenery that kept the world from being only danger.

The job was a line of skill and tiny, stubborn faith. Repeaters like this one kept towns talking if someone could keep the feed staunched against corrosion and stray currents. Rowan's work was physical, a choreography of hands and harness, of tie-offs and torque. On the workbench at the pylon's base they kept a small jar of conductive gel, a strip of braided copper and a spool of one favorite, ugly adhesive tape. Today the repeater had moaned—dropped bursts, gone thin on its carrier frequency. Rowan climbed and found the spot: a splice that had been repaired once, then again by someone who'd left the job half-woken. The outer sheath was a mess of mismatched sleeves and brittle sealant.

Rowan set to with practiced impatience. They sanded back the worst of the corrosion, heated a bit of old solder with a hand torch that spat a stubborn blue, and pressed the splice home. Fingers ached in a good way, as if they'd been doing honest work. The radio panel blinked less nervously; a steady light returned. They tightened, they cussed softly, they smiled in consideration for the small miracle of a circuit obeying hands.