Marck leads Mayor Jahns and Deputy Marnes through Mechanical to the mess hall. Marnes tries to act as if he knows the way, while Jahns hangs back and questions Marck about Juliette. As they walk, Jahns notices how open and communal the down-deep people seem, and Marck immediately frames Juliette as one of their own, saying the workers in Mechanical are like family.

At the table, Jahns asks Marck whether there is anything they should know about Juliette. Marck says Juliette can handle any job given to her and guesses Jahns and Marnes have already come too far to be talked out of recruiting her. Marck’s wife, Shirly, joins them and jokes about the visitors trying to drag Juliette upstairs, reinforcing that Juliette belongs in Mechanical and would be hard to move.

Marck then tells a story from Juliette’s first days as a shadow. When Juliette arrived as a skinny twelve-year-old, she was given what was meant to be an impossible initiation task: hauling ten heavy pumps up to Walker’s shop so the motors could be rewound. Marck and others expected Juliette to fail or run away, because the pumps were far too heavy for a child to move and the assignment was designed to break her.

Instead, Juliette completed the job in six days and even asked Knox for a day off afterward. Marck reveals that Juliette solved the problem by bringing only one pump to the shop, watching Marck work on it, then hiding it nearby and teaching herself overnight how to rewind the other motors on her own. She repeatedly brought Marck the same pump while independently repairing the rest below, matching his pace and beating the task through ingenuity rather than brute force.

The story makes Jahns admire Juliette’s intelligence, while Marck offers a warning instead of simple praise. Juliette spent her earned day off back at Walker’s shop asking questions and learning more, showing that she is driven as well as clever. Marck concludes that Jahns and Marnes should be careful if they give Juliette a job, because Juliette will actually do it, even when others never intended the assignment to be possible.