Spring came to the three valleys the way a bill comes: quietly, and then all at once.
The district did not send the table this year. It sent one sheet of paper per station, with a single ruled box, wide enough for three digits, and a line under it: THE NUMBER YOUR STATION STANDS ON.
Merta put it on the bench at six in the morning. By seven we had the rest of the rule from the clerk who carried it. Each station sends one number. The machine stays where the highest number is. Prices are not to be sent with it.
The clerk said that last part twice, in the voice people use when they are being kind about something they did not decide.
We had two numbers in the house. Twelve, which was true, and had cost forty labels, two nights and one argument we were still having. And nine, which we could have had whenever we wanted, by teaching the line on the same letters we then measured it with. Nine was in the room the whole time. It was not written anywhere, which is how nine stays available.
Uncle Cautious looked into the box for a long time. The box was the size of a hand. It had been made to hold one thing.
He wrote 12. Under it he wrote the date, in the small hand he uses when he is being careful. He did not write forty. The box would not hold forty. That was the whole design of the box.
The child had been keeping a hundred letters under the bench since the thaw, sealed in her own way, tied with string from the label book. A month had passed. She opened them on the morning we sent the sheet, and she had not told anyone she planned to.
Fourteen. Not twelve. The letters had not changed. The street had. Two new houses at the end of the lane, a shop that painted its name where a number used to be, and one family that painted over its own door.
So the number we sent had already moved by the time anyone read it. She wrote both numbers on a card, twelve in the top half and fourteen in the bottom half, with the date across the cut, so that the two halves could not be separated without tearing the date.
The mountain station sent eleven, and their clerk wrote in the margin that eleven had been measured on letters the station had never taught on. The river station sent nine.
Nobody asked the river station where its nine had been measured. Nine was the number. It went into the box.
On Thursday a wagon came with two men and a plank. The machine came out of the back room the same way it had gone in, one corner first, with the grey technician walking backwards and saying nothing.
Merta stood in the doorway with her pencil behind her ear and watched the glass eye go past her at eye level. When the plank was on the wagon she tore the stub out of the sheet and pushed it into Uncle Cautious's coat pocket.
"Keep the card," she said. "They are taking the machine. They are not taking the reason."
That afternoon the district sent a second letter, shorter than the first. It asked for the methods to be written out for all three valleys, by the station that had written them best. Two copies. One for the district, one for the valleys.
It did not say which station that was. It did not have to. Nobody else had written anything down.
So the machine left and the paper stayed. That is the sentence this family will be repeating for a long time.
That night Uncle Cautious took the promise ledger down from the shelf. The key had been in his coat since the thaw. He put the ledger on the long bench under the lamp, where everyone could see it, and he opened it in front of the child, in front of Merta, with the cold room door open behind them.
The first page was a promise about what rules would do. It was written by a man who could not be argued with, in a hand that expected to be obeyed.
He read it aloud. Then he turned to the margin and wrote four words, and turned the ledger around so that the child could read them.
Kept: none. Counted: all.
The child looked at the page for a while. Then she took the card out of his pocket, twelve on top and fourteen underneath and the date across the cut, and she hung it on the nail above the bench, next to the key, where the light is best.
"How long do we keep sending the same number?" she asked.
"Until it stops being true," he said.
"Then we should send the date with it."
"We are not allowed."
"Then we keep the date here."
So we did. There is a card on the wall with two numbers on it and a date across the middle, and beside it a key that no longer has a lock to open, in a house where the machine has gone and the method has not.
That night SEARCH wrote one number on the slate and did not explain it. RULE said nothing. In the cold room, the line on the pinned paper still says what it has always said: it moves.
House of Sparks is a work of fiction. The family, the stations and the valleys are invented. The technologies they live through are not.