The Second Frame Sat True

Nial Triffett was the first to finish eating. He left his plate on the communal table and walked back toward The Learning Grove site while the settlement was still gathered around the fire pit. Adrian Pafistis and Kain Jeffries followed within minutes, Adrian carrying a fresh set of drill batteries and Kain with a bundle of plywood sheets balanced across one shoulder. The light was fading but the air was still warm, and the container's open doorway faced west, catching the last of it.

The interior was as Nial and Marco had left it — two walls battened, one window framed with its shimmed header, the second opening still bare, and a thin layer of sawdust across the floor plates. The remaining pre-cut battens were stacked against the rear wall. Nial had already counted them before dinner and knew they were short by perhaps a dozen lengths for the remaining two walls. Kain solved the problem before it became one, pulling a handsaw from the tool roll and cutting fresh battens from the plywood offcuts while Nial and Adrian started fixing the existing stock to the third wall.

The difference in pace was immediate. Adrian could hold a batten level against the corrugation with one hand and drive a screw with the other, reading the line by feel rather than checking with a spirit level every third fixing. Kain worked the same way — less refined than Adrian, but his hands knew the drill and the timber well enough that Nial did not need to check his work. The three of them spread across the container's width without crowding each other, each man taking a section and working it methodically from floor rail to ceiling height.

The third wall was battened in less than forty minutes. The fourth wall, the short panel opposite the container doors, took less again — the span was barely two and a half metres and required only five horizontal runs. Nial checked the levels across both walls when they were done and found nothing that needed correcting. The battens sat flat and tight against the steel, the screw heads countersunk just below the timber surface, ready to receive panelling without any proud fixings catching the sheet edges.

The second window frame went in next. Kain held the header while Adrian drilled the pilot holes, and Nial fixed from the interior side, driving each screw with the steady pressure the steel demanded. Kain's grip did not shift. The header seated level on the first attempt, and Nial checked it twice with the combination square before moving on to the vertical studs — not because he doubted it, but because the afternoon's crooked frame had made him cautious. The studs went in plumb. The sill sat true beneath them. The finished frame was clean and square and would not need shimming. Nial ran his hand along the joint between header and stud and found it tight. He said nothing about the other window.

With the battening and framing complete, they turned to the plywood. The sheets Kain had carried from the supply pile were standard eight-by-four, which meant each one needed cutting to fit the container's height and trimming around the window frames, corner posts, and any fixings that interrupted the flat plane of the battens. Nial measured and marked while Adrian and Kain cut, working on the ground outside the container where the remaining light was better and the sawdust would not settle on the battened walls inside.

The first sheet went up on the rear wall — the longest unbroken run, with no windows to cut around. Nial held it flush against the battens while Kain drove screws at regular intervals along each batten line. The plywood pulled tight against the timber frame and the corrugated steel behind it disappeared. Where there had been industrial ridges and grinding marks, there was now a flat, pale surface that smelled of fresh-cut wood. The transformation was small but specific, and it changed the interior from a steel shell into something that could be worked with.

The side walls were slower. Each sheet needed notching around the window frames — careful cuts with the handsaw that followed the pencil lines Nial had drawn, leaving a clean margin of five millimetres between plywood edge and timber surround. Adrian handled the cuts around the crooked first window with particular care, scribing the plywood to match the frame's slight misalignment rather than fighting it. The result was a panel that sat flush despite the imperfection behind it, the error buried between layers where it could do no visible harm.

They panelled three of the four walls before the light failed entirely. Kain fetched one of the settlement's oil lanterns and hung it from a ceiling vent bracket, but the yellow light threw long shadows that made accurate marking difficult, and Nial called a stop rather than risk a miscut on the final wall. The remaining work — one short wall of panelling, the trim pieces around both window frames, and a general clean-up — could be finished in the morning with fresh light and fresh eyes.

The three of them gathered the tools, stacked the unused plywood sheets inside the container against the one unpanelled wall, and walked back toward the settlement. The clearing was quiet. The container sat in the dark behind them with three of its four walls lined and both window frames in place — still open to the air through the unglazed windows, still bare-floored, still smelling of steel dust and fresh timber, but measurably closer to a room than it had been when the sun went down.