Then Evelyn said, “I thought Julian had convinced the street you were spying on people. That’s how he described you to me.”
“I pointed the camera at my driveway because somebody kept leaving broken glass behind my car.”
“Did you find out who?”
“An overloaded recycling truck. Not exactly an international conspiracy.”
Evelyn let out an embarrassed breath. “He told me it watched his crews.”
“It probably did. They park in front of my house. But I wasn’t monitoring them.”
“He said he could use it to make it look as if I threatened his workers.”
“That’s why you sprayed it?”
“In part.” Evelyn scraped a patch of paint. “I was furious. That was the other part. I wanted to damage something that made me feel watched and powerless.”
“Thank you for saying that.”
“Don’t thank me. I’m not proud of it.”
Mara rinsed her cloth. “The blue key frightened you more than getting caught.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Peter asked me to keep it after the accident. He said the key should have stopped everything. I couldn’t bear to look at it. I gave it to Gabriel with the rest of the controller pieces, and then spent years remembering things the wrong way.”
Mara leaned the scrub brush against the railing. “You never blamed Peter, did you?”
“I blamed us both. We invited children into a machine we didn’t understand completely.”
“Maybe the part you didn’t understand was someone else’s addition.”
“Maybe. That doesn’t erase our responsibility.”
They worked until most of the pink was gone. A narrow stain remained beneath the eave, visible only if one knew where to look. Evelyn promised to pay for a replacement camera and left the red ladder as collateral, insisting Mara keep it until she made good.
The following day would decide whether the Lantern Walk happened at all.
Mara went to bed thinking about the external input and its twelve-petal pattern. Somewhere between sleep and waking she remembered a fact she’d overlooked: in Evelyn’s childhood drawings, the Glass Garden had twelve petals, but the floor in the gym had only eleven working sections.
She sat up.
One petal was missing.
***
Mara arrived at the school at seven the next morning. The gym doors were locked, but through a narrow window she could see the covered platform. She sketched the pattern from memory on the back of a coffee receipt: twelve petals around a central hub, eleven responding motor groups, and one blank arc near the eastern edge.
If the controller sent a twelve-part command to an eleven-part mechanism, its behavior depended entirely on how the missing channel had been handled. A responsible redesign would remove that channel from the program. An impatient one might bridge it to the nearest motor, doubling the load and making one corner leap.
