The shell moved at the ninth hour of the harvest, and Doss pulled the release.
They had rigged the jacket through the night. Six panels laced together over a patch of Sable’s outer face two meters across, beside the docking strut, sealed at the edges with tape and Doss’s grommets. The duct ran from the Tern’s engine housing along the strut into the jacket’s mouth. Every panel had Doss’s seam a hand’s width in from its edge, stitched light. The lever was bolted inside the lock beside the hatch, painted red with the last of the Tern’s marking paint, wired to every seam at once.
Then they had warmed the shell. Slowly, as Mara had learned from the shard. A notch on the idle, an hour’s wait, Eshel reading temperatures through the probes Doss had pushed into the crack. A notch more. The inside held cold by the station’s own chill.
And the mirror iron had come.
In patches, under the jacket, where the warmed outer plating flexed against the cold inner layers. Mara had felt it through the docking strut, through the Tern’s hull, through her palm on the lock’s wall: the thin high note, many of them, faint, climbing. She had called each one as it came.
