The rest of the morning passed in a kind of quiet urgency. They did not stop working on the clock. Maren would not allow it. If they stopped, she thought, the fear would get in, and fear, like dirt in a movement, stops everything. So she directed, and Soren's hands obeyed, and the movement grew cleaner, and the new suspension spring waited in its paper wrapping, and the clock, piece by piece, came back toward itself. But underneath the work, Maren's mind kept returning to the rung, to the saw, to the hand that had held it. She thought about who came and went in the tower. The tower was not locked. It had never been locked. Anyone could climb the stairs in the evening, when Soren had gone home, and stand in the dark with a saw, and cut a rung, and walk away, and no one would know. That was the terrible part. Not that someone had done it, but that anyone could have, and that the town would never know who, unless the evidence spoke louder than suspicion.
At noon they went down for bread, and Maren saw Fallon across the street, standing outside his print shop, talking to two men she did not know. He was smiling his council-meeting smile, and one of the men was holding a paper, and Maren felt her stomach tighten. She did not go over. She did not accuse. She ate her bread on the tower steps with Soren, and she said, "Mr. Krogh, I want you to keep the rung safe. Not in the tower room, where anyone might walk in. Somewhere only you know. And I want you to write down, in your book, the day you found it, and what it looked like, and that I saw it with you. So that later, no one can say we invented it after the fact."
Soren looked at her for a long moment, and then he said, "I will write it tonight. In Danish, and in English, both, so that no one can say I hid it in a language they do not read."
Maren almost smiled. "You are a careful man, Mr. Krogh."
"I am a carpenter," he said. "A carpenter who does not write things down builds the same mistake twice."
After bread, they went back up, and Maren had him fit the new suspension spring at last. It was delicate work, the kind of work her own hands would have done in minutes, and Soren's large hands did it slowly, following her words one at a time: "Steady now. Straight. Do not force it. Let it find its own seat." His brow furrowed with concentration, and his breath came slow, and Maren watched his fingers, and she thought about how trust is built. Not in speeches. Not in promises. In this: a person saying "steady now," and another person being steady. In a spring finding its seat. In a rung wrapped in cloth and kept safe. In a ladder built true, rung by rung, by two people who had every reason not to trust each other and who had chosen to do it anyway.
When the spring was seated, Maren let out a breath she had not known she was holding. "Good," she said. "Now the pendulum."
Soren fitted the pendulum rod, and Maren talked him through the beat, the even tick-tock that a clock must have, like a heart, and when he set it swinging, very gently, with one finger, the movement came alive in his hands. It was not keeping time yet. It was only moving, the way a sleeper moves before waking. But it moved, and Maren, who had not heard a clock tick in this tower since she arrived, closed her eyes for a moment and listened, and the sound filled the tower room, small and steady and true.
"It moves," Soren said, wonder in his voice, as if he had not quite believed it would.
"It moves," Maren agreed. "Tomorrow we will see if it remembers how to keep time."
They worked until the light failed, and then they wrapped the movement again, and they went down the new ladder together, and at the bottom Maren stopped, and she looked up the stairwell, at the tower above them, at the place where she had fallen, and she thought about the rung, wrapped in cloth in Soren's keeping, and about the saw marks, fresh and yellow, and about the fact that someone had wanted her to fall. She