Not a whistle or a creak — a pure, high-frequency tone, like a wine glass being rimmed, but from every board at once. The frequency matched the line voltage exactly — 60 hertz. The wood had become a capacitor. An acoustic resonator. A living thing forced into oscillation.

Arlo’s boss, a woman named Kestrel who ran the mill like a frigate, looked at him over her reading glasses. “The old Condon rig,” she said. “It’s still in shed four.”

The hum was not a sound. It was a pressure . Deep, subsonic, felt in the sternum. The air around the rig began to shimmer. Water vapor hissed from the end grain in thin, angry jets. Within four hours, the oak’s surface temperature hit 180°F — but the core remained cool to the touch. That was the magic. The steam was migrating outward along the cell walls, driven by the voltage gradient, not by heat diffusion.

He didn’t finish the order. He dismantled the Condon rig himself, piece by piece, and buried the electrodes in a dry grave behind shed four. The museum got its oak from a conventional kiln — late, over budget, and boring.