He left then, with a tip of his hat, and Maren stood in the tower doorway watching him walk across the square, neat and soft-spoken, toward his newspaper office, and she felt the same coldness she had felt at the petition, only sharper now, because a man who warns you politely is more dangerous than a man who threatens you loudly, and because she understood, at last, that this was not merely a job anymore. It was a contest, and the prize was not a clock, but a tower, and a town's belief in its own ability to keep what it had built.
She went back up the new ladder, one-handed, with Soren's arm to steady her, and she sat in the clock room with the movement before her, and she looked at the cracked spring and the grime, and she thought about ink, and about petitions, and about soft-spoken men, and she made herself a promise, the way her father had taught her to make promises: not loudly, and not to anyone else, but quietly, to the work itself. She would fix this clock. She would fix it with a sprained wrist and a carpenter's hands and a town watching, and she would let the clock, when it ran again, say what no editorial could say: that Fox Creek could mend what was broken, and that it did not need to tear down its tower to be safe.
Outside, the evening light was going gold on the rooftops, and the Gazette office glowed with lamplight, and somewhere in that office, Otis Fallon was setting type for the next edition, laying down his ink, line by line, and Maren, in the tower above the square, with her bound wrist and her father's tools and a carpenter beside her, thought about the petition on the store counter, and about the names already on it, and about the names that would be added tomorrow, and she understood that the week ahead would not be decided by clocks alone. It would be decided by whether a town, offered a choice between tearing down and mending, could remember which of the two it had always done before.
That evening, Abel Trent came to the boarding house, and he did not apologize for calling late this time, because late calls, Maren was learning, were the way business was done in Fox Creek when the business was difficult. He sat in Mrs. Petersen's parlor, with his hat on his knees, as before, and he told her, plainly, what she had already guessed: that Fallon's petition would be presented to the council at its next meeting, a week from Thursday, and that the council was divided, and that the division was not, as Maren might have supposed, between men who loved the tower and men who did not, but between men who feared Fallon's newspaper and men who did not, which was a different division, and a harder one, because fear of a newspaper is a practical fear, and practical fears are the hardest to argue with.
"He will print your name," Trent said. "He has already printed your fall. Next he will print that you are an outsider, which is true, and that outsiders do not understand this town, which is not true, but which will sound true to men who have never left it. He will print that the clock is old, which is true, and that old things should make way for new, which sounds wise until you ask what the new thing is, and discover that it is his printing house."
"Then the council must be shown something that is not print," Maren said. "Something they can see and touch. A ladder that is sound. A clock that runs. A tower that stands. Ink can be argued with. A running clock cannot."
Trent looked at her for a long moment, the way he had looked at her on the first evening, and she saw in his face the same weariness, and beneath it, something else: a flicker of hope, the way a man looks when someone else says the thing he has been thinking but has not dared to say aloud. "A week from Thursday," he said. "That is the meeting. If the clock runs by then, or if it is plainly on its way to running, the petition will have nothing to stand on. If it does not, Fallon will have everything he needs, and the tower will come down, and no one on the council will be able to stop it, because no one on the council will want to be the man who voted for a dangerous tower in an election year."