They buried Iona beside the Low Brace water tower, because no transport record could now claim her.
The guild lawyer explained it in the yard, standing at the bench with her folder, while the crew stood around her and Pell held Mara’s sleeve. Iona Venn had been listed as boarded on the transport Halden Wake and declared dead in its fire. Officially she had died three years ago, in the transport fire. If the yard took her body to the municipal registry now, the registry would have to decide what she was: a person who had died three years ago in a fire and had now come home from a sealed station, which was not possible; or evidence, in a Compact containment matter, which would mean the Compact claimed her. Either way she would go into a drawer.
“So she goes into the ground,” the lawyer said. “Here. On yard land. And the yard writes it in its own book.”
The water tower stood just beyond the yard’s back fence, on a strip of ground that the yard had leased with the rest of its land twenty years ago and never used: a patch of hard earth and frost-killed weeds under the tower’s iron legs, between the fence and the lane. Tavin’s land. The yard’s.
