Elvira

The working would either hold or it would not, and she would know which one about four seconds after it was too late to choose differently.

She had said this out loud at the station, in front of Thorne and the Krenyi analyst and the robot, in the flat voice she used for things she did not want misheard as modesty. I do not predict. I attempt, and then I read what the attempt did. Thorne had written it down. That was the correct response and she had thought better of him for it, and it had not made the fact any less true at half past four in the morning with her hands in the wet chalk at the base of the third tree.

Seven trees. The anchor was not in any of them. That had taken her most of the previous day to establish and it was the only part of the work she was certain of: the coupling ran under the root plate, in the space where seven Etheric extensions overlapped and became, for about two metres of depth, a single continuous structure. The entity had not attached itself to a tree. It had attached itself to the overlap — to a thing the grove made together and no single tree could be blamed for.

She had come to admire it, slightly, in the way she admired any well-made joint.

Chalk, thread, and water in a vessel of known volume. The materials were the same ones she had used on the causeway for three years, and the circle she was laying was the same shape as every circle that had failed there for three years. That was the part she had needed to explain twice at the station. The circles had not been wrong. The circles had been correctly rejected by a structure she had been reading through a fog the entity was maintaining. Take the fog away and the same craft, unchanged, met the same structure and was answered.

She set the last thread and put her palm flat against the chalk and did not close her eyes, because closing them added nothing and she had never seen the point of ceremony.

Nothing happened for a while. Then the ground under her hand changed temperature — not warmer, not colder, later, as though the cold had been rescheduled — and she understood that she had four seconds.