"I saw the Gazette," Soren said, when they were in the clock room together, with the movement standing silent between them.
"So did I," Maren said. "He has made my fall into an argument for demolition."
"He has made your fall into an argument for his printing house," Soren corrected. "There is a difference, and the town will learn it, if someone shows them. But I will not lie to you, Miss Reed. Fallon is clever. He does not lie outright, which would be easy to catch. He selects. He prints the rotten ladder, which is true, and he does not print the new ladder, which is also true. He prints the danger, which was real, and he does not print the repair, which is underway. A half-truth, printed weekly, is harder to fight than a lie, because you cannot call it false without sounding as if you deny the true half."
Maren looked at the movement, at the cracked spring and the grime, and she thought about the week of work ahead, and about the fact that her wrist would not allow her to do it alone, and about the fact that a newspaper was now working against her, and she felt, for a moment, the weight of all of it settle on her shoulders like a coat that did not fit. Then she did what her father had taught her to do when a job seemed too large: she broke it into pieces, and she took the first piece in her good hand.
"Then we work," she said. "We clean the movement, one wheel at a time, with your hands and my eyes, and we fit the new spring, and we make the clock run, and we let the clock answer him. A clock that runs is an argument no editorial can print away."
Soren nodded, and they began. It was slow work, and strange work, and at first it was clumsy, because Soren's hands, though steady, were carpenter's hands, broad and strong, and the movement's parts were small and delicate, and Maren had to learn to say, in words, what her own hands would have done without thinking: turn this screw a quarter-turn, no more; hold that wheel so, with the tweezers, not your fingers; brush the grime away from the teeth, gently, as if you were brushing dust from a moth's wing. She learned to speak precisely, and he learned to listen precisely, and by midday they had cleaned three wheels, and the brass shone where it had been gray, and Maren felt the first small lift of hope, the way a person feels when a long task begins to move.
At noon, they came down from the tower for bread and water in the square, and that was when Maren saw the petition.
It was on the counter of the general store, where the storekeeper kept it beside the penny candy, as if it were an ordinary thing, and a dozen names were already on it, in different hands, some careful, some hurried. The heading, in Fallon's own neat print, read: PETITION TO THE TOWN COUNCIL: FOR THE SAFETY OF FOX CREEK, REMOVE THE DANGEROUS TOWER AND RELEASE THE LOT FOR USEFUL PURPOSES.
Maren stood looking at it, with her bandaged wrist at her side, and she felt a coldness that had nothing to do with the tower's shade. A petition is a quiet thing. It does not shout. It sits on a counter, and people sign it while they buy sugar, and they do not think of it as a decision, only as a signature, and by the time anyone counts the names, the decision has already been made in a dozen small moments no one remembers.
The storekeeper, a man named Petersen, no relation to Mrs. Petersen of the boarding house, or perhaps a distant one, for Fox Creek was full of Petersens, looked at her with an expression she could not read. "It is Mr. Fallon's petition," he said. "He brought it in this morning. He says the tower nearly killed you, miss, and that the town ought not to wait for it to finish the job."
"The tower did not nearly kill me," Maren said, and her voice was steadier than she felt. "A ladder nearly dropped me, and the ladder has been replaced, and the tower stands, and I am standing here, and I intend to fix the clock."