“You want to see the heart,” Ysol said. “Before you go. Every visitor I’ve had wanted to see the heart.”
“How many visitors have you had?” Sera said.
“Three crews,” Ysol said, “counting yours.”
She lifted one hand. The consoles around the hub’s wall dimmed, all at once, their grey-green glow pulling away from the screens, and the light gathered again above the table where Mara’s survey lay. This time it gathered into a drawing.
It hung in the air above the table, a little below eye level: a diagram, in fine pale lines, slowly turning. Mara knew the shape at once. She had built one.
A heart. A lamp’s heart, the core of an outlet, drawn in cross-section. The central chamber where the flow came in from the lattice. And around it, set in a ring, the channels: the passages that carried the flow out of the chamber and divided it, metered it, sent it on.
Six of them. Evenly spaced. Mara counted them as the drawing turned. One, two, three, four, five, six. The same pattern as Lorn’s old heart, the same pattern as the heart she had built in the Lorn cradle, six offset channels around an open center.
