Pell was waiting at the yard gate when Mara came out from the fourth trial, late on day four, with a folded sheet of paper in his jacket and his notebook under his arm.
He had been up since before dawn. She could tell from his face: the puffiness under his eyes, the ink on his fingers up to the second knuckle, a smudge of it on his cheek where he had rubbed his eye with an inky hand. He had been at the yard’s console before dawn, she guessed, reading the public band, and then all day at the dormitory’s public table, where he had begun doing the household survey since the bench meeting, because the dormitory had a big table and good light and nobody minded a boy with a notebook.
He did not say hello. He said:
“I want to come on the forge flight.”
Mara stopped in the gateway.
The forge flight. That was what the crew had started calling it: not a flight, because Hearth’s forge was under the shrine and they walked there down a stair, but the word had stuck from Lorn, where it had been a flight. The trip down into the forge to install the brace, when the segments were ready. The work in the drum, with the heart in its rings.
