Her wrist was bound in linen, neat and tight, and she held it against her ribs as if it were something she was carrying for someone else. The doctor had said it was a sprain, not a break, and that it would heal if she did not use it. Maren Reed did not seem to be a woman who was good at not using things. She kept reaching for tools with her right hand, catching herself, and switching to her left with a small, irritated breath through her nose. Soren watched her do it twice before he said anything. He was not a man who spoke quickly.
"You cannot hold the loupe steady with that wrist," he said at last, plainly. "Not today."
She looked at him. Her eyes were gray, the color of the creek in winter, and they did not flinch. "I know," she said. "That is why I brought you."
"Me?"
"You have steady hands, Mr. Krogh. I watched you yesterday when you set the newel post straight in the stairwell. You did not hurry it. A clock does not forgive hurrying either."
Soren felt his ears go warm, and turned toward the clock, because it was easier to look at brass than at a woman who had just told him the truth about his own hands. The clock was a good one, older than the town hall itself, brought up from Denver by wagon twenty years ago and set into the tower with great ceremony. Soren knew its face the way he knew his own tools. He did not know its insides. Maren began to teach him, and teaching, he discovered, was a different kind of work from doing. She did not touch the movement herself. She stood beside him, her bound wrist tucked against her side, and told him what to look for, and he looked, and his hands did what she said, and slowly the clock stopped being a mystery and became a machine again.
"There," she said, pointing with her left hand, her finger hovering a careful inch above the brass. "The pendulum suspension spring. See how it hangs? It should hang true, like a plumb line. Yours hangs crooked."
Soren leaned in. He had brought his own lamp up, and the light fell yellow across the gears. The spring was a thin strip of steel, no wider than his thumbnail, and it was cracked near the top, a hairline fracture that he would never have seen if she had not told him where to look. He felt a small, private shame, because he had kept this tower for six years and had never once opened the clock case. He had oiled the hinges. He had swept the stairs. He had not known the spring was cracked.
"It has been cracked a long time," Maren said, as if she had heard him think it. "That is why the clock ran slow before it stopped. A cracked spring does not break all at once. It tires, the way a rope tires. And then one day it gives."
"And the dirt," Soren said, because he could see it now too, the fine gray dust packed into the teeth of the wheels, the grime of twenty years. "It is filthy."
"It is," she agreed. "A clock in a tower breathes what the tower breathes. Dust, and damp, and in summer, the smoke from the kitchens below. I have seen worse. I cleaned a courthouse clock in Cheyenne once that had a bird's nest in the weight shaft. This is only dirt."
Soren laughed, a short sound he had not expected from himself, and Maren smiled, and for a moment the tower room did not feel like a place where a woman had nearly died. It felt like a workshop. He liked workshops. He understood them.
They worked through the morning. Maren directed and Soren's hands obeyed, and the strange thing was how quickly it stopped feeling strange. She had a way of speaking that left room for a man to think: she did not say "do this," she said "the spring must come out straight, or it will bend, and a bent spring is worse than a cracked one," and then she waited, and Soren figured out how to hold the pliers