Cinder’s dock authority received the Tern as both miracle and contraband, and could not decide which, and so did both at once.
Mara saw it through the cockpit glass as they came in. The main civil dock at the Low Brace’s river edge, the long concrete apron where the freight haulers landed, was not empty as it usually was in the early afternoon. It was full. People stood on the apron in a great loose crowd, hundreds of them, held back from the landing ring by a line of dock authority officers in their blue coats and a row of iron barriers that had been dragged into place in a hurry, some of them still crooked.
“That’s for us,” Sera said.
“How do they know?”
“Your warning.” Sera eased the Tern down toward the ring. “You sent it to Cinder’s public band yesterday morning, from Lorn. The Lorn dawn went out on the same band. People listen to the public band in the market line. Somebody worked out which ship.”
The Tern came down on the ring with a long hiss of hydraulics. On the coupling Mara had made, the pliant seam on the forward claw took the load and flexed and came back. She felt it through the deck and thought of the yard, the jacks, ten strokes at dusk.
