Before they went back to the clock, Maren asked Soren to bring the rest of the old ladder into the light. "If one rung was cut," she said, "I want to know whether it was only one. A man who cuts one rung is sending a message. A man who cuts them all is setting a trap for anyone. The difference matters."
Soren dragged the old ladder out from behind the tower and laid it full-length on the grass, and together they went over it, rung by rung, the way she went over a movement, slow and without skipping. Maren ran her left hand along each rung, feeling for straight lines where there should be none, and Soren bent close with his carpenter's eye, looking for the pale yellow of fresh wood against the gray of age. The rails were rotten in places, soft under the thumb, and two more rungs were weak with rot, bending a little when Soren pressed them. But none of them was cut. None of them had the straight line, or the fresh sawdust, or the deliberate stop three-quarters through. Only the one rung, the one her foot had found, had been sawn.
Maren sat back, and the knowledge settled over her like a cold cloth. Whoever had done this had not wanted just any fall. He had wanted a particular fall, on a particular morning, when a particular woman was climbing to the clock. He had known she was coming. The whole town had known she was coming; the council had hired her weeks before, and Fallon's own paper had printed her name. That did not narrow it. It widened it, and widening frightened her more than narrowing would have, because it meant the hand could have belonged to anyone who had read the paper and walked up the tower stairs in the evening, when no one was watching. She pushed the thought away. Her father had taught her to hold a fact the way you hold a hot gear: firmly, and only as long as you must, and then set it down before it burns you. The fact was the cut. The rest was shadow, and shadows were not evidence.
That evening, alone in her room at Mrs. Petersen's boarding house, Maren opened her own notebook, the small oilcloth book she carried beside her father's case, and she wrote down what she had seen, in her neat, slanted hand: the date, the rung, the cut three-quarters through, the fresh sawdust, the rot beside it, the other rungs examined and found uncut. She wrote it the way her father had taught her to write a repair record: no adjectives, no guesses, no names. A repair record that guesses is a lie with good intentions, he used to say, and a lie with good intentions still breaks the clock. When she finished, she read it back twice, and then she closed the book and sat by the window, her bound wrist in her lap, looking out at the tower against the darkening sky. She thought about the morning of the fall again, not the terror of it, which she had set aside, but the small details she had not examined: the way the stairwell had smelled of pine and dust, the way Soren had called up to her to wait while he steadied the ladder, the way she had not waited, because she was a woman who did not wait well. She had been in a hurry that morning. She had wanted the clock open before noon. If she had waited thirty seconds, Soren would have been on the ladder with her, and the rung might have held them both, or broken under him instead. The thought was not fair, and she knew it was not fair, but it came anyway, the way unfair thoughts do in the quiet, and she let it come and let it go, because blame, like dirt in a movement, stops everything if you let it settle.
She slept badly that night, and woke before dawn with the image of the cut rung behind her eyes, straight and yellow, and she got up and dressed in the dark, and went down to the tower early, before Soren arrived, and stood in the stairwell looking up at the new ladder, pale and true in the half-light. It was a good ladder. She had helped build it. No saw would find it easily, and no evening visitor would cut it unnoticed now, because Soren had taken to locking the tower door at night, a thing he had never done before, and he had not asked anyone's permission to do it. He had simply done it, the way a man does a necessary thing, and Maren, standing there in the quiet, felt steadier than she had felt since the fall. The tower was not safe because it was old and loved. It was safe because two people were keeping it, rung by rung, gear by gear, fact by fact. That was enough to begin the day on.