"Three days, Mr. Krogh," Fallon said, pleasantly. "Three days is a beginning. It is not an ending."
Then he walked on, his shoes loud on the dry boards of the walkway, and Soren stood in the street with the sun on his face and the tower ticking above him, and he understood, completely, that the trial had only just begun to be dangerous. The clock had kept its time for three days. Fallon had four days left to find a way to stop it, and a man with a press and a petition and a plan printed before the fall would not spend those four days idle.
Soren climbed back up to the tower room, where Maren was waiting with her case open and her bandaged wrist resting on the bench, and he told her what Fallon had said, word for word, because she deserved the words exactly, not softened. She listened, and she nodded, and she looked at the movement, ticking steady behind its glass, and then she looked at him.
"Then we keep the clock true," she said, "and we keep the paper safe, and we let the days do what days do."
Before the light went, Maren opened the logbook and, with her left hand, wrote the third entry herself, slowly, letter by letter, her bandaged wrist resting on the bench beside the page. "Day three," she wrote. "True to the minute." Her handwriting was awkward and slanting, nothing like Soren's careful hand, but it was legible, and it was hers, and when she set the pen down, Soren saw that her hand was shaking slightly, not from pain, but from the effort of having done a thing herself for the first time since the fall.
"Three days in ink," he said.
"Three days," she said. "Four to go. And ink does not forget."
Soren nodded. Outside, the hot wind moved through the street, lifting dust off the boards and carrying it past the hall, past the print shop, past the tower that stood over them both, ticking its true time into the afternoon, one minute at a time, while the whole town, whether it knew it or not, was learning to listen again.
Maren woke before the light did, the way she always did in Fox Creek now, and before she did anything else she did the small test she had done every morning since the fall. She held her right hand out in front of her, palm down, and turned it slowly, first one way and then the other, watching the tendons move under the skin like cords under canvas. Then she picked up her father's smallest screwdriver from the bench beside her bed, fitted it between thumb and forefinger, and rolled it, feeling for the tremor that had been there for weeks, the fine shake that made precision work impossible.
This morning the tremor was gone. The ache was still there, a dull thread pulled tight along the inside of the wrist when she bent it too far, but the hand was steady. She set the screwdriver down and pressed her palm flat against the table and felt the wood, cool and solid, and for a moment she did not move at all, because the return of a thing you have lived without is a quieter kind of joy than getting something new. She had not been able to hold a tool properly since the ladder broke under her. Soren's hands had done everything since: the rating nut, the suspension spring, the cleaning of the movement, all of it guided by her voice while she stood beside him with her arm in a sling and told him, a quarter turn, no, back a fraction, there, hold it there.
She dressed and went down to the kitchen of the house where she was lodging, and ate bread and drank coffee standing at the window, looking out at the street while Fox Creek woke. It was late summer turning toward autumn, and the light had changed in the last week, coming in lower and more golden, and the air smelled of cut hay and dust. Down the street the town hall stood with its tower against the sky, and the clock face, white in the morning light, showed the hour truly. She knew it was true because she had checked it against the depot agent's watch at noon every day for four days, and the trial log, kept open on the table in the town hall vestibule for anyone to read, said so in four different hands.