On Saturday, Mara was supposed to meet Dina at her uncle's yard at ten, to borrow his laser measure.
At twenty past nine, she was on the platform at Cut Bridge.
The wind at Cut Bridge smelled of wet gravel and brake dust. A coffee kiosk had a screen showing the weekly Hunter rankings, and two old men in caps were arguing about third place. On the pillar next to Mara, a poster of a smiling nurse said PROTECT THE LINE. Somebody had given the nurse a mustache in blue pen.
A man was standing right at the platform edge.
He was about forty, in an orange courier's jacket, with earphones in, rocking a little on his heels to whatever he was listening to. The toes of his boots were over the yellow line.
Above his head, there were white numbers.
[00:47:10]
Mara saw the man and where he was standing, and decided she knew the cause.
She'd spent all week reading drawings and looking for the ways things break. A man at the edge of a platform with his ears blocked was an easy one. She had the answer before she'd asked herself a single question.
'Edge. Tram. Doesn't hear it coming,' she thought. 'Fine. Move him.'
She walked over and touched his arm.
"Excuse me. Sorry. Do you know how I get to the fish market from here?"
He took out one earphone. He had to think about it.
It was a complicated trip, and Mara had picked it for that reason. He was a kind man, and he explained it properly, using both hands.
"Okay... out the far end, second left, steps down by the bakery. Don't take the first steps, they go to the parking lot. People always take the first steps."
His tram came in behind him while he was talking. Its brakes squealed the whole length of the platform. The doors opened and closed, and it left.
He watched it go and laughed.
"Ha! That was mine. Never mind. There's another one."
He waved her sorry away and told her to hurry, or she'd miss the good fish.
She walked a little way down the platform and turned back.
[00:44:02]
It hadn't jumped. It hadn't paused. It was running at the same speed as before she opened her mouth.
'The next tram, then,' Mara thought. 'It has to be that one!'
***
She got on the next tram with him.
She stood by the middle doors, where she could see both ends of the car. The tram ran beside the East Wall for a stretch, and the red wall lights went past in their cages, pale in the morning sun.
Nothing happened at the doors.
He got off at Harbor Road. It was Mara's own stop.
She followed him down her own street, and two streets past it. The number went down through the thirties, and down through the twenties. It never sped up and it never slowed down. Mara was starting to hate how steady it was.
He let himself into an apartment building with a key.
Mara caught the street door before it shut.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
The stairwell smelled of floor polish and frying onions. She heard him climbing above her. Third floor. A door opened, and a child's voice called out, high and happy, and the door closed.
Mara climbed up and stood on his landing.
'What are you going to say?' she thought. 'You have no idea... none.'
She knocked anyway.
He opened the door with his earphones hanging around his neck. Behind him was a narrow hallway with a small pair of red rain boots in it. She could smell coffee.
"Fish market," he said.
He looked surprised.
Mara held out her own glove. "I think you dropped this?"
"That's not mine."
[00:17:30]
"Are you feeling all right?" Mara asked.
That changed his face.
He took half a step back and put his hand on the edge of the door. To him, she was a stranger who had followed him home from a tram stop.
"I'm fine," he said. "Are you?"
"Yes. Sorry. Yes."
He shut the door. She heard the chain go on.
***
Mara sat on the stairs half a floor down, where she could still see his door.
Through it, she could hear a radio, and the little girl singing along... with the wrong words. The number went down through the tens.
At two minutes, she couldn't stay inside the building any longer. She went down, crossed the street, and stood on the sidewalk opposite, beside a lamppost with a white shelter arrow painted on it.
By her watch, the count reached zero while she was staring up at the third-floor windows.
One of them had a paper snowflake stuck to the glass.
Nothing happened at the windows. There was no sound. A man walked by with a dog, and the dog stopped to sniff the lamppost.
'Nothing? So what was the number for?'
Her phone had six messages from Dina.
--Dina--
I'm at the yard
uncle says hi
uncle says where are you
Mara
the measure is literally in my hand
ok
***
On Sunday, Mara went back.
She knew before she'd crossed the road.
There was a printed sheet pasted to the street door, with a thick black border. It was how Qasra told you someone had died, and you could read it from across a street.
His name. Forty-three.
Suddenly, at home.
A woman in a housecoat was sweeping the entrance. She saw Mara reading and leaned on her broom.
"His heart," she said. "His father went the same way, at the same age. He'd only just come in. The little girl was showing him a drawing."
"Did you know him?"
"He gave me directions once."
The woman nodded as if that made sense, and went back to sweeping.
Mara stood against the wall by the trash cans, opened her notebook, and wrote it up standing.
CASE 09. Male, 43. Saturday. Seen directly at 00:47:10.
I took the cause to be the platform edge. Intervention: delayed him by one tram.
The count did not change when the tram left. It didn't change at any point after. That was information, and I didn't read it.
I followed him and kept trying to stop the wrong cause. I was at his door with seventeen minutes left and I asked him if he was all right.
Outcome: died. Cardiac.
She read it back.
She could have known one thing. The number had kept the same pace from the platform to the door.
'Forty-four minutes. You watched his clock for forty-four minutes,' she thought, 'and you checked the tram timetable. The tram timetable!'
Under the case, she wrote a rule. It was the first rule in the book.
If the count doesn't change, I have the wrong cause. Stop. Start again from the person.
The rule wouldn't have saved him. Only a doctor could have done that. She copied it inside the front cover in capitals, so it would be the first thing she saw whenever she opened the book.
***
That evening, Dad sat at the kitchen table with the week's pump schedules spread out in front of him.
The kitchen smelled of lentil soup. Dad's tea had gone cold by his elbow and grown a skin.
Mara sat down across from him. She hadn't done that on purpose in a while.
He didn't look up. He slid the top schedule across the table to her and put his finger on one column.
"Check that for me. It won't come out right."
Mara found it in about a minute. He'd carried a number over from the wrong line.
She put her own finger on it.
His eyes went to where she was pointing. For a second, neither of them moved their hands.
"Your mother would have had it faster," Dad said.
He turned his cup a quarter turn and took the sheet back.
"Can I ask you a work question?" Mara said. "About plant rooms?"
He took his glasses off. That was how Dad said yes.
"If you had a plenum forty times bigger than the dose it was built to hold, what would you think?"
"Somebody was frightened," he said. "In those years, everyone was." He rubbed his thumb along the table edge. "I put three pumps on the north intake myself, where one would have done. They're still there. I walk past them every day."
"Where is this plenum?"
"It's a thesis question."
"Mm."
He kept his eyes on her a moment longer.
"You aren't sleeping."
"I'm working."
"In this family, that's the same thing."
"Dad. Say nobody was frightened. Say it was drawn that size on purpose, by people who knew what they were doing."
He didn't answer straight away. He stared at the pump works calendar above the stove, the way he did with every engineering question she'd ever brought him. He'd never once given her a quick answer.
"I'd think the dose on the schedule wasn't the dose it was built for."
Mara opened her pad to Thursday's page. Under Helix Adaptive Systems, in the margin, she wrote his sentence down word for word, while Dad sat across the table and watched her do it.