Chapter Two: She Can Hear the Current
Lily learned things impossibly fast. It took others a month to master pretreatment, but she picked it up in three days. Others relied on test strips to read the color of the plating bath, but she only had to glance down to know whether the zinc ion level was high or low.
Andy asked her how she knew. She said, "The color talks."
That afternoon, the workshop received a batch of marine hardware with a delivery deadline of only five days. Ajie hung the fixtures on the production line, but Lily suddenly stopped him: "The seventh contact can't be hung. There's a crack there—it'll cause pitting after plating."
Ajie didn't believe it. It was a new fixture, just taken out of the warehouse. Andy examined it with a magnifying glass for a long time before he spotted a hairline crack at the base of the contact.
"Are your eyes microscopes?" Ajie muttered.
Lily didn't laugh. She stood by the bath, tilting her head slightly, as if listening to something. Andy followed her gaze and saw only the rectifier's needle trembling faintly.
"The current is unstable," she said. "There'll be a trip tonight."
At nine that evening, the workshop indeed lost power. The lights along the entire street went out, leaving only the emergency light by Tank No. 3 glowing. Andy went to check the wiring with a flashlight. When he returned, he saw Lily sitting on the steps, her boxed meal untouched.
"Not to your taste?"
"I'm not very hungry," she said.
Andy pushed the meal toward her: "At least eat a little. You're too thin."
Lily picked up her chopsticks, put a single grain of rice into her mouth, and chewed very slowly. Suddenly she frowned: "The rice today has a metallic taste."
Andy took a bite but tasted nothing unusual. He looked at her, recalling that she never drank water, never looked in mirrors, and walked without making a sound. Those tiny oddities were like impurities in the plating bath—invisible most of the time, but when things quieted down, they all floated to the surface.