"A week from Thursday," Maren repeated. "My wrist will not be healed by then. But the clock does not need my wrist. It needs my knowledge and Mr. Krogh's hands, and both of those are available, and both of those are willing. We will be ready, Mr. Trent. Not with speeches. With work."
After Trent left, Maren sat alone in the parlor, with the Gazette folded on the table beside her, and she thought about her father again, as she had thought about him on the first night in Fox Creek. He had once told her, when she was fifteen and had asked him why he never advertised his shop, that a clockmaker's advertisement is the clocks he has fixed, and that they stand in other people's houses and tick, year after year, and that no printed word can tick. She had thought, at fifteen, that this was a quaint and old-fashioned view, and that the world belonged to men who could print. She thought differently now. She thought that Fallon's ink, for all its blackness, could not make a clock run, and could not make a tower fall, unless the town let it, and that the town would let it only if no one showed the town another way.
She thought, too, about Soren, and about the way he had caught her, and about the way he had said, without hesitation, that his hands were hers to direct, and she felt a warmth she did not quite know how to name, because it was not the warmth she had read about in stories, all sudden and dramatic, but a quieter warmth, the kind that comes from working beside someone and discovering that their steadiness steadies you. She did not call it by any name. Names, she had learned, are a kind of claim, and she was not ready to claim anything, except the work, and the tower, and the week ahead.
And in the gathering dark, with the frozen hands at twenty past four still staring from the tower faces, she picked up a brush with her left hand, and she began, slowly and precisely, to clean the first wheel, because work, when everything else is uncertain, is the one thing that is not.
Soren Krogh had been keeping the tower for six years, and in all that time no one had ever asked him how it worked. They asked him to oil the hinges. They asked him to sweep the stairs. They asked him, twice a year, whether the roof leaked, and he answered honestly, and they wrote his answers down and forgot them. When the clock stopped, a month ago, the council had sent for a clock repairer from three towns away, and Soren had not minded that. He was a carpenter, not a clockmaker, and he knew the difference the way a man knows the difference between a hammer and a saw. What he had minded, though he had not said so to anyone, was that when he told the council the ladder was rotten, they had thanked him and done nothing, and then a woman had climbed it anyway.
He had caught her. That was the part people talked about in the street now, in lowered voices, as if it were a story and not a thing that had happened to two real people on a Tuesday morning. Soren did not like being talked about. He liked wood. Wood did what you asked of it if you understood it, and it told you plainly when you did not. The ladder had told him plainly, months ago, when he put his thumb into the side rail and the wood gave like wet bread. He had written it down in his own book, in Danish, because his English was good enough for talking but his hand still thought in the language he had learned to write in: *Stigen er raad.* The ladder is rotten. He had shown the book to the council clerk, who had nodded and said the budget would be looked at in the autumn. The autumn had come. The ladder had not been replaced. Maren Reed had climbed it, and the rung had broken under her foot, and Soren had been standing below with his arms full of tools because he had gone up after her to hold the ladder steady, the way a man does when he knows a thing is unsafe and cannot stop someone from using it.
Now, three days after the fall, he stood in the tower room with her, and the clock lay open before them like a patient on a table, and he was trying very hard not to look at her wrist.