The yard was quiet when they came to it, with the furnace banked.
Mara stood in the gateway and looked at it. Everything was where she had left it. The bins in their rows, under their tarps. The melt pit shed. The long grey mound of the slag pit along the back fence, with the hole they had dug for the trunk filled in again, a darker patch in the grey. The cold tray by the quench tank. The bench under the work lamp. And above the bench, on the smoked whitewash, in her own square capitals: LISTEN. FOLD. QUENCH. 9 HOURS. And under them, the sentence.
The guards were gone from the lane. Halvek had withdrawn them, Pell said, the day after her warning went out on the public band; the guild lawyer had seen to it, somehow, with a clause.
Beyond the yard’s back fence, the old municipal water tower stood over the lane on its iron legs, as it always had, rusted and patched, its tank painted a green that had faded to grey. Mara had walked under it a thousand times without looking up. She looked up now. She did not know why.
Iona’s trunk was in the yard store, a lean-to behind the office where Tavin kept the things he wanted kept dry. Mara saw it when she went to put the rod’s case away. Its steel corners were dull from the slag pit. The luggage tag still hung from its handle on its twist…
