He looked at the mechanism on his desk.
"The secondary pivot," he said.
"Yes," she said.
"You are building the secondary pivot," he said. "The thing that accepts the variation and keeps the transformation stable." He looked up at her. "The information network. The audit structure. The new appointments. All of it — you are not fighting the resistance. You are building something that works with it."
She looked at him.
She thought about patient hands.
She thought about six generations at the same stall.
She thought about Oren's sixty years of finding new things in the same material because he had never stopped looking.
"Get some sleep," she said. "Tell Oren about the secondary pivot tomorrow. He will have something to say about it."
"He will have many things to say about it," Samuel said.
"Yes," she said. "That is how you know it is a good idea."
She turned to leave.
"Elder sister," he said.
She stopped.
"The forty-three," he said. "In Tarven."
She waited.
