In the morning Mara went to the gate bay and found Caldris preparing to leave.
The survey ship’s crew were loading it through the ring: cases, the guards’ kit, a sealed crate Mara had not seen before. Caldris stood by the ring with her slate. The guards stood along the walls. Lisan was not with them. He was in the lowest chamber, where Mara had left him, with the Lorn technician on the link, walking him through the replacement heart’s sensor panel so that someone on Lorn’s Reach would know how to read it after they were gone.
“You’re going,” Mara said.
“I am returning to Meridian,” Caldris said, “to report.”
“Report what?”
Caldris let that pass.
Mara had spent the night thinking about what to ask for. She had lain on the cot in the guest room with notebook I on her chest, the three orders and Lisan’s slip and Caldris’s admission and the route that ran through Hearth, and she had thought about it as she would think about a load sheet: what was needed, in what order, by whom.
“Two things,” she said. “Safe passage for your ship. Back to Meridian, without anyone stopping you. I won’t stop you and I’ll tell the Reach not to. That’s the first.” She paused. “The second is a warning. Sent to Cinder. Unedited. That Hearth is on the queue in twelve days, under the same route as Sable and Sorrel and Whitlow and Lorn, and that the queue’s reason is…
