Anwen found the flake on the inner face of the shell.
They had gone down from the hub to the shell chamber, the five of them, by a narrow ladder that ran beside the central pillar into the dark: a long curved room at the bottom of the station where the outlet’s heart had been, and where the inner face of the outer shell made one whole wall. The heart was gone. Removed, Ysol said, during retirement, along with anything else that might have been salvaged. What was left was the shell’s inner face, a great dark curve of plating, cold, rimed in places with old frost.
Doss had rigged a lamp. A shell lamp, the guild called it, a hard white work light on a stand that ran hot enough to keep a welder’s hands warm in a cold bay. He set it at the foot of the shell’s curve and turned it up, and the inner face caught the light.
Most of it was dull. Grey plating, pitted, scorched in places where the outlet’s flow had run hot against it for centuries.
But in one place, low down, where a seam in the plating met a crack, something glittered.
