Pulse

The coast kept its own calendar now: gull calls at a particular hour, the snap of fog against rust, the measured clank of brass gears that had been wound since before anyone in the settlement could name the wind. Nika had learned the hours by listening. She woke with the lamp-house shutters and the slow exhale of the tower, and she slept when the last echo of the mechanism shivered down through the metal and into the stone. People said she belonged to that tower as much as the tower belonged to the headland. She tended it like a liturgy.

The tower was not the kind of structure that relied on electricity. No wires ran cleanly down the cliff; no glass panels split the air into cold blue light. It was older, stubborn in its simplicity: weights and counterweights, a system of cams and levers, an array of polished lenses turned by gears across a shaft the way a heart spun a pulse. The beam itself was a heavy lantern sealed behind thick glass—plain, reliable—and its swing was timed by a massive spring housed in the basement, wound by hand every few days. That rhythm had kept fishermen from losing their way for as long as the community had been rebuilding.

On days when the fog lay like a curtain and the sea tasted of iron, the residents gathered in the roundhouse at the tower’s base. There they took turns telling things aloud: family names, the maps of fields, the small histories that stitched one household to another. Oral keeping had become their archive, a living ledger in the mouths of people who were careful about speech because speech was all that remained. The rituals were practical—anything on paper had burned or rusted or been rendered unreadable in the silence—and they were holy. Each recounting kept a story from dissolving. Nika sat through them and added her own memory of a small cook fire long ago, the shape of a brother’s laugh. She kept the tallies with knotted thread around her wrist and the click of the tower in her bones.

That morning, the tower’s beat was off.

It began as a tremor in the gear train, a hesitation like a cough. The beam leaned a degree or two wider than it should have, then returned to its mark, and Nika smelled it before she heard it: a faint scorch of bearings, the metal like a throat gone dry. She climbed the spiral with the slow, practiced motion of someone who has memorized the exact distance between every rung. Her hands knew the pattern of each bolt; her palms fit the worn grooves of the rail as if the wood had been shaped to her grip. On the platform she found the lens humming a thin, uncertain note. The counterweight had dipped a fraction. She ran her fingers along the housing and found grit where there shouldn’t have been grit—tiny black fragments from a gear that had been holding together for years.

She could have kept to the routine. She could have wound the spring and tightened the same screws, and the beam might have steadied again for a season. But the fragment was a piece of something else tucked behind a bracket: a strip of folded paper wrapped in grease, sealed with wax and the guttering impression of a small handprint. Past the people who maintained records had been careful to avoid the old ways—stored things and catalogs—but sometimes the past hid itself in practical seams, and the past had a way of pressing against living things.