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Rain-soaked and careful, signal technician Cass Havel rigs a jury bypass to divert a relief train bearing purifiers and presses to a neighboring town. Tension and ingenuity mingle with small absurdities and the day's work of hands and tools — a tight, tactile struggle for salvage and connection.
Cass Havel woke to the soft mechanical sigh of the tower's gears, a low exhalation that belonged to the place more than to any breathing thing. She swung her legs over the bunk, palms finding the familiar gouge on the handrail where she'd once jammed a wrench during a storm and come away with a new scar and a new respect for leverage. Dawn pooled through the slatted windows; beyond them the ruined line ran like a silver tendon across the flats, half-swallowed by ragged reed and the first morning fog. The air smelled oddly domestic: roasted mushroom skins from a neighbor's breakfast fire, sugar-steamed fruit crusts cooling on a windowsill, the tang of iron and oil. Those were not details about the rail at all, but they steadied her. They were why towns kept lighting kettles even when the boilers were patched with shoe leather.
She pushed herself up and padded to the cabinet, fingers brushing the outlines of tools hung like obedient pets. Spanner, her battered adjustable, dangled on a leather strap with a small buzz-buzzer attached—a ridiculous humanizing device Harkin had wired into the handle because he claimed it made the wrench more talkative and therefore less likely to be lost. Spanner had a personality that leaned toward sarcasm whenever vibration met metal.
"Morning, rust," she muttered, and tapped the strap. The buzzer coughed a tiny electronic rasp. "Don't start. I have to see how the semaphore's holding." Cass moved with the patient precision of someone who'd spent a life reading how springs answered to pressure. She twisted open the maintenance hatch, squinted at the bronze teeth of the drive, and fed oil along the shaft, feeling for the exact place where resistance hinted at a failing tooth. Her hands were practiced: they could measure a gap by feel, coax a stuck pawl free without collapsing the whole linkage, cradle a failing relay while she replaced the burnt contact with one borrowed from a broken lamp.
Below, the street pulsed with morning logistics. A market cart clattered past selling fermented kelp cakes wrapped in cloth and candied root tokens traded like currency; children played at balancing on a fallen length of rail and pretended it was a high throne. A wind-chime guild hung tiny scavenged bells across alleyways, harnessing the frequent gusts into an off-key chorus. Those were the ordinary rhythms that had nothing to do with signal levers yet shaped how the town woke. Even in a place that ran on iron and timing, someone trimmed rosemary by window sills and invented a new pastry shape on rainy days.
Ashas's knock came three times, patient and familiar; Cass didn't need the third before she recognized the cadence. She braced her shoulder to the hatch and called down, "Asha? Come up. The ladder's still honest today." Asha's reply came with the sort of exasperated chuckle reserved for people who had spent childhoods with one another. "If your tower's honest, I'm coming. Also, someone painted a hat on your cone. It looks very royal." Cass could picture the ceremonial cone-cover the Devotees insisted on applying whenever someone worked on a public lever: a knitted topper that looked like an absurd crown. She laughed—a short sound she hadn't bothered to practice.