The woman at the sounding house was angry with her own sentence.
She read it from a slate, struck one word out and looked across the water again. Beside her stood a broad resonator table, its tensioned surface protected beneath a low roof. A mallet lay on a folded cloth where it could not roll onto the floor.
Iven stopped outside the marked working space.
The woman glanced at his boots, then at the slate.
“Do you know the difference between asking someone to move and telling them they are in the wrong place?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Good. Apparently I am relearning it.”
Her name was Pera. She was a human interpreter working the Lower Rung station, where the second water approach met the maintained road. She had dark marks from the resonator’s grip along her fingers and the absorbed impatience of a person trying to keep a complicated thought from becoming a convenient one.
