That evening Mara went back to the forge.
She could have gone up to the room above the office and shut the door. Nobody would have said anything. Tavin would have kept the pot warm and Pell would have brought her soup and the crew would have worked around the space where she wasn’t. Grief was a reason. Everybody in the Low Brace knew it as a reason.
But the cut was on day nine. It was day six. Three days, and the brace had one segment seated on Hearth’s service rail and five more that had to follow it, and a pocket that had never held load, and a coolant tank that was empty, waiting on a bucket and a reading. Her mother had spent her last nine hours running pumps. Mara was not going to spend this evening in a room with the door shut.
She went in through the forge door into the heat.
The crew had finished the segments.
They stood along the far wall on trestles, five of them, each the length of a man, each a curved section of steel and coil with its joint faces ground bright. They had come in from the Low Brace’s shops over the past days in pieces, and the crew had fitted and welded them here, under Tavin’s eye, while Mara was on the moon. Now they were done. Finished, cooled, waiting.
