In the evening, after the crew had gone, Mara took the rod into the yard’s cold shop.
The cold shop was a lean-to off the melt pit shed where Tavin kept the quench tank’s spare water and the things that needed to stay cool: oils, gaskets, a crate of the hard biscuit, the yard’s small store of good steel. It had one lamp and a narrow bench and, on the wall above the bench, a line terminal: a plain grey box with a socket, which the Directorate had installed in every licensed yard years ago, so that the energy office’s maintenance line could be reached from anywhere a repair might be needed. Mara had never seen anyone use it.
She set the rod’s case on the bench and opened it and took the rod out, slowly, and held it a while before she laid it down, as she held a part she did not yet trust.
It lay on the bench in the lamp light, white, its end cap intact. She had looked at it every night since Lorn, the way she had looked at the strip every night in the yard before the trunk. She did not know what it would do. She knew what Lisan had said: it reads seals. It cannot fix one. And she knew what it had done in Halvek’s side room, ticking in the reader’s cradle while the clerk read out mark after mark.
