Maren Reed had kept her father's tool case beside her bed for five years, and in all that time she had never once opened it without thinking of his hands. His hands had been large and scarred, with a missing thumbnail on the left from a mainspring that got away from him in 1871, and he had taught her the trade the way he had taught her to swim: by putting her in the water and staying close enough to catch her, but not so close that she could not learn. When she was twelve, he had let her clean her first movement, and when she was sixteen, he had let her fit her first suspension spring, and when she was twenty-two, he had died of a fever in the winter, and she had taken his case and his trade and gone out into the world alone, because there was nothing else to do with hands that knew clocks and a heart that did not know how to stay still.
Now, in Fox Creek, with her right wrist bound and useless for fine work, she was learning what it was to need someone else's hands, and she did not like the lesson. She had spent her life being the person who fixed things. Being the person who pointed and waited went against everything her father had taught her about self-reliance, and yet, as she stood in Soren Krogh's yard that morning, watching him carry the old ladder out of the tower on his shoulder like a dead thing, she found that she was grateful in a way she had not expected. Gratitude, she was discovering, was not the same as weakness. It was only the recognition that some jobs take more hands than you have.
Soren set the old ladder down on the grass behind the tower, away from the street, where no one would trip over it or carry it off for firewood. He did it without ceremony, the way a man puts down a tool he is finished with, and then he turned back toward the tower, already thinking about the clock, and Maren, who had followed him out with her good hand holding her shawl closed against the morning wind, said, "Wait."
Soren stopped. "What is it?"
"The old ladder," Maren said. "Before you leave it here. I want to look at it."
Soren frowned, not unkindly. "It is rotten, Miss Reed. That is why we replaced it. There is nothing to learn from it now."
"Perhaps," Maren said. "But I fell from it, Mr. Krogh. I think I am owed a look."
He nodded, slowly, and stepped aside, and Maren went to the ladder and knelt beside it in the grass, her skirts spreading around her, her bound wrist held against her ribs. The ladder was a sad thing up close. The rails were gray with weather, and the rungs were dark where hands had gripped them for years, and where the rung had broken under her foot there was a gap, the sockets raw at both ends. Maren looked at the gap for a long time, the way she looked at a movement before she touched it, letting her eyes do the work first. "Mr. Krogh," she said. "The rung. You kept it. Bring it here." Soren went into his workshop and came back with the rung wrapped in cloth, the way she wrapped a movement, and he laid it on the grass between them. Maren unwrapped it, and then she saw it, and her breath stopped, the way it had stopped on the morning of the fall, when the world had tilted and Soren's arms had been the only solid thing in it.
"Mr. Krogh," she said, very quietly. "Bring me your lamp. And your knife."
Soren did not ask why. He went into the tower and came back with both, and he held the lamp low over the broken rung while Maren, with her left hand, turned the splintered end toward the light. The break was not clean. That was the first thing. A rotten rung breaks soft, the fibers pulling apart like wet string. This rung had broken in two ways at once: part of it had pulled apart, soft and gray, the way rotten wood does, but part of it had been cut. The cut was straight, and fresh, and it went three-quarters of the way through the rung, stopping just short of the far side, leaving only a thin shell of wood to hold a person's weight. And in the cut, caught in the pale inner wood, there was sawdust, fine and yellow, the color of new pine, not the gray dust of old rot.