The air grew warm as Jane and Cecelia continued etching the magic circles into the stone dock. Jane had started the work with her jacket on, but that came off in the first twenty minutes. Her knees went from aching to numb. Her hand cramped so badly at one point that she had to stop completely, sitting back on her heels and flexing her fingers until the pain subsided.

  Cecelia’s section of the outer circle was growing at roughly the same rate as Jane's. This should have been encouraging, but her aunt somehow managed to make the whole process look easy. There was no visible strain in Cecelia’s posture or any signs of discomfort. She just kept carving, her perfect grace only slightly marred by sweat and dust.

  She's done this before. Probably hundreds of times. I should have asked how many circles she's etched in her life. Probably more than I can count.

  About an hour before midday, they stopped to eat. Jane and Cecelia purchased food from a nearby restaurant, then sat on the edge of the dock, chewing in exhausted silence.

  "How are you holding up?" Cecelia asked eventually.

  "I'm fine." Jane flexed her aching hand. "Just not used to this kind of work."

  "Your section looks good. Clean lines, steady depth. Just keep it that way, and remember: it won’t be over until it’s over."

  The praise helped, even though Jane's entire body was screaming at her to stop. She finished her bread, drank deeply from the water flask she'd bought with lunch, and then got back on her hands and knees, face down in her detail work.

  The afternoon was worse than the morning. There was no shade on the dock, and the sun was coming down more directly now. Jane and Cecelia kept at it, completing the outer circle and moving on to smaller shapes inside the greater design. The first of those was about half-complete when Cecelia made a noise.

  It wasn't loud. Just a small, sharp intake of breath, followed by a muttered naughty word that Jane never would have expected her aunt to utter in her presence. Jane looked up to find Cecelia sitting back, staring down at the stone with an expression of pure frustration.

  "What's wrong?" Jane asked.

  "I ruined it." Cecelia's voice was flat. "The angle's wrong."

  Jane set down her stylus and crawled over to look. Her aunt’s large oval was beautiful work, the result of at least a half-hour of painstaking effort. But even Jane could see the problem. Where the oval was supposed to meet up with one of the circular elements, there was a gap. Not a huge gap, but enough to render the entire circle useless if they left it as-is. The geometry didn't work. The pattern wouldn't function.

  "I was too focused, and not focused enough at the same time. It's supposed to connect here, but instead it's..." Cecelia gestured helplessly at the gap.

  "It's okay," Jane said. She moved her aunt gently aside and placed both hands on the stone, feeling for the stabilization working beneath the surface. "I can fix this."

  "Jane, you don't have to. I can do it myself."

  "I can fix it."

  Jane closed her eyes and reached for her magic. She gathered her power carefully, then pulsed it out in a wave of intent. The magic flowed down through her arms, into her palms, and into the stone beneath. She felt the etched lines in the rock's surface. They were delicate, which suited her purpose. Rock was a lot harder to work with than the wood of Frank’s ship.

  Gently, she encouraged the stone to remember what it had been.The carved lines began to fill in, and the oval vanished as though it had never existed.

  Jane released the working and sat back, breathing hard. The effort had taken more out of her than she had expected, but the result was clean.

  "There," she said. "Good as new."

  Cecelia was staring at the smoothed section with an expression Jane couldn't quite read. "You're getting pretty good at that kind of circle-less work."

  "I've had practice. Renovating ships."

  Her aunt laughed. "I'm not going to ask for the full story behind that. Whatever it was, it did you good."

  They sat there for a moment, both of them too tired to resume work immediately. The sun was lower now, though there was plenty of daylight left to suffer in.

  "We should call it a day," Cecelia said finally.

  "Are you sure? I hate this, but I could keep going.”

  "No." Cecelia shook her head. "If I'm making mistakes like that, there's nothing for it. We'll pick this up tomorrow morning when we're both fresh."

  "All right," Jane said. "Tomorrow morning, then."

  Cecelia headed back to her rented room at Frank’s, finally showing just a bit of stiffness from the work as she walked away. Jane watched her aunt go, making sure the older woman got off the dock safely. Then she turned in the opposite direction.

  Jane had nothing else demanding her attention that day. Furthermore, she knew exactly what she wanted to do with her free time.

  She wasn’t quite hungry yet, but there was a sandwich shop near the main square that she wanted to try. To her delight, her protesting muscles loosened up as she walked slowly. She was almost normal by the time she reached the corner shop. Buying two sandwiches, she carried them away wrapped in paper.

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  She made it to the now-familiar staircase in no time and descended into the pleasant shade beneath the bridge, enjoying the river-cooled air as she strolled through the shops and stalls of the Underbridge Market. When she rounded the last corner, she stopped and just stared.

  Allen’s workshop had been cluttered before. Now it was completely insane.

  There were barrels stacked in the corner. Metal cable was coiled everywhere, thick heavy stuff piled in loops that probably added up to miles if you stretched it all out end to end. Rope was tangled through the whole mess. Jane saw both big lengths and short segments that looked like they had been salvaged from other projects.

  And the cranks. Oh, so many cranks.

  There were seven or eight of them, each one different, ranging from small hand-worked mechanisms to massive gear-driven assemblies. Some looked like prototypes, but the big ones had clearly been pulled from some piece of scrapped machinery, meant for different work and just waiting to be retrofitted to whatever monstrosity Allen was building.

  At the center of it all was the man himself, bent over a piece of equipment that defied immediate identification. It was huge, at least six feet across, made of metal and wood and what looked like pieces of several different broken machines. They’d all been welded together into the framework for something completely new.

  Allen was so focused on his work that he didn't notice Jane's approach. She watched him for a moment, admiring his talent. She saw no signs of uncertainty or second-guessing. He was building something ambitious and complex, and extremely dangerous if it didn't work correctly, but he didn’t seem worried at all.

  Jane cleared her throat. Allen jumped, spun around, and broke into a grin.

  "Jane! You're here!"

  "I brought sandwiches," she said, holding up the wrapped package. "Though looking at all this, I'm starting to think you might need more than one."

  Allen set down whatever tool he'd been holding and wiped his hands on a rag that looked like it had given up on actually cleaning anything weeks ago.

  "So," he said, gesturing at the chaos around him. "This is the winch system. Or it will be. Soon, I hope."

  Jane gazed at the massive frame, trying to make any sense of it. "It looks like a lot."

  "It is a lot. But it’s also pretty simple." Allen moved to the frame and tapped one of the larger gears. "This is the main drive gear. It connects to these smaller gears here, which multiply the force. So when people turn the crank, they have to turn it more times, but it produces a lot more force than they could generate normally."

  "How much more?"

  "If I've done the math right, it’s about fifteen to one. Meaning if I get a bunch of strong men on the crank, there’s basically nothing in town they couldn’t budge." Allen moved his hand down to one of the coils of thick cable. "This runs from the winch down to the lake floor. At the end, I'll attach a sort of lasso. You secure the barrels to the harness, signal that you're ready, and we pull them up."

  “It looks a little stronger than it needs to be, if anything.”

  "It's salvaged from a mining operation in the mountains. They used it to haul ore carts. It can handle ten times what we'll be asking of it, but that’s a good thing, you know? You don’t want this to break halfway."

  "What about these?"

  Allen was obviously excited about each aspect of what he was building. It took a while, but he walked her through every inch of the machine. He showed her where the legs of the frame would bolt down, explained the distribution of weight, and talked about stress points and load-bearing calculations. Jane understood about half of it, but she grasped enough to feel confident that Allen had thought of everything.

  "I think I comprehend the basics. What did you come up with to minimize trips, though?" Jane smiled apologetically. “That’s sort of the important part to me. Not that all of this isn’t great, but I’d like to spend as little time under there as possible.”

  Allen looked a little embarrassed. "Sorry. I get carried away sometimes. I did solve that, I think. It was actually the kind of thing that money could solve. We have a lot of these cables, each with their own loops. We can just swap them onto the machine on the shore as we haul the barrels out one by one. I should have told you that earlier."

  "Don't apologize. I like seeing you excited about your work." Jane unwrapped one of the sandwiches and handed it to him. "Here. Eat this, then get back to the winch. I want to watch you finish it."

  "Watch me?"

  "I just want to understand what you do better." Jane settled onto a clear spot on his workbench, her legs dangling. "Don't worry about me. Just do whatever you were doing before I got here."

  Allen took a bite of the sandwich and looked at her. "You're just going to sit there?"

  "That's the idea."

  "That's okay, I guess." He gave her a quick smile. "I'll try not to be boring."

  He finished the sandwich in a few more bites, then wiped his hands again and turned back to the frame. For the first few minutes, he kept glancing over at her. Then the work pulled him in, and his movements became more natural, to the point where Jane suspected he barely remembered she was there.

  An hour passed as Jane's sandwich remained unwrapped in her lap, forgotten in favor of watching her boyfriend work. She found she didn't want to interrupt the process to talk to him. It would have been a shame to shake him out of the zone he had worked so hard to enter.

  The process was beautiful. Not in the sense that a waterfall or a tree was beautiful, but there was something compelling about watching someone who knew exactly what they were doing. It drew Jane in every time. Though Allen’s work was still fairly mysterious to her, it was at least clear why people came to him. He attacked jobs with a kind of focus that could hardly help but produce results.

  Finally, he stepped back, looked the whole thing over with a critical eye, and huffed with dissatisfaction. It couldn’t have been so bad, though. He was smiling.

  "That's it," he said.

  Jane hopped down from her perch and walked around the completed winch. It was massive, as tall as she was and twice as wide in both horizontal directions. Allen had said they’d secure it to the stone, but it was so heavy and solid that it hardly seemed to require such securing.

  "It's a bit more simple than I thought it would be," she observed.

  "It'll work." There was no doubt in his voice. "I've triple-checked every joint. This will bring those barrels up."

  Jane tried to imagine it in operation. Soon, she would be down in the water, looping the cables around the barrels and hoping the lake didn’t come crashing down on her.

  But that was a problem for the day after tomorrow. Today's problem had been building the winch, and Allen had solved it.

  "Thank you," she said quietly. "For doing this. For all of it."

  "You don't have to keep thanking me." Allen was looking at her now, instead of at the winch. "I wanted to help."

  "I know. But I'm thankful anyway."

  Smiling, he held out a hand. "Can I walk you home?"

  Jane took his hand without hesitation. "Sure."

  They climbed the stairs up from the Underbridge Market. Allen's hand was warm and calloused from his work, but gentle around her fingers. They walked slowly, taking the long way that led past the lake.

  The first stars were beginning to appear overhead. Somewhere down there, seventeen barrels waited. Tomorrow, they would finish their spell circle, and Allen would mount the winch. The day after that, they would start to pull the infection from the water.

  There was still so much that could go wrong. But for the first time, Jane had the strange feeling that everything might actually turn out all right.

  When they reached her door, Allen squeezed her hand once before letting go.

  “I like you a lot,” he said. “More than I thought I could.”

  The statement was so sudden that Jane didn’t know how to respond. Allen seemed to expect that. Leaning down, he kissed her forehead in a way made her chest ache. Then he stepped back, gave her one last smile, and headed off into the darkening streets.

  Jane stood on her doorstep and watched him go, then turned and went inside.

  Silly boy. How am I supposed to sleep now?

  .

  !