"Yes," Maren said.
They stood there in the tower room with the clock ticking behind the wall and the clean parts bright on the cloth and the old newspaper lying between them like a stone dropped into still water. Maren thought about all the things she wanted to do at once: to carry the paper straight to Fallon's shop and lay it on his counter; to show it to every person in Fox Creek who had signed the petition; to stand in the street and read it aloud until the whole town heard. She wanted to do all of that, and she knew, even as she wanted it, that she must do none of it yet. A paper shown in anger would be argued with. A paper shown at the right time, in the right place, with the other evidence beside it, could not be argued away. She had learned patience from clocks. A clock does not hurry. It keeps time, and in keeping time, it wins.
"We keep it safe," she said. "We do not show it yet."
Soren looked at her, and something in his face eased, as if he had been afraid she would say the other thing, the rash thing, and was relieved to find she had not.
"Where?" he said.
Maren opened her father's tool case. She took the folded cloth that had wrapped the spare spring, and she laid the newspaper inside the case, folded once, carefully, so that the notice was on the inside of the fold and the date was where she could see it. She closed the clasp. The click sounded loud in the quiet room.
"There," she said. "It stays with the tools. Tools are for fixing things, not for waving about."
Soren nodded. He picked up the broken rung from where it lay on the bench beside the clock parts. He had kept it since the day of the fall, wrapped in a rag, and the rag was still around it. He unwrapped it just enough for them both to see the end of it: the old rot, gray and soft, and beside it, cutting clean across the grain, the fresh saw marks, bright as new wood. Two pieces of evidence, lying side by side on the bench: a rung that had been weakened on purpose, and a notice that had been printed before the fall. Neither one named the hand that had held the saw. Maren did not need it to. She had stopped asking who had held the saw. The saw was not the point anymore. The point was the plan, and the plan was printed, dated, and in her father's case.
"Do you think he knows we have it?" Soren asked.
"He does not know this paper exists anymore," Maren said. "Old papers are kindling to him. He prints a new one every week and forgets the old ones. That is his weakness. He thinks printed words are only for the week they are printed in."
She looked at the clock parts on the cloth, bright and clean and waiting. The trial was coming. The clock would have to speak first, in the only language it knew: true time, checked at noon, day after day, where the whole town could see. The paper would speak later, when the town was ready to hear it. That was the order of things, and Maren felt, for the first time since the fall, that the order was on her side.
Soren wrapped the rung again in its rag and set it back on the bench. He did not say anything more about Fallon. Instead he said, "Your wrist. How is it?"
Maren flexed her hand, slowly, and felt the familiar ache answer her. "Better," she said. "Not well. I can guide. I cannot finish."
"Then I will finish," Soren said, "and you will guide. As we have done."
"As we have done," Maren said.
Before the work resumed, Maren had an errand she could not put off: the oil bottle was nearly empty, and the final inspection would need a fresh drop on every pivot. She left Soren fitting the hands and walked down the main street to the general store, her case left safe in the tower room, her wrist tucked against her side. The street was busy in the late morning way of a small town: a wagon unloading sacks of flour, a woman shaking a rug over a porch rail, two boys chasing a dog that had no intention of being caught.