The yard counted itself at closing, every day, on a board of black slate bolted to the wall beside the office door.
It was Tavin Rusk’s board. Nobody else wrote on it. The hands brought their numbers to him and he chalked them in columns that had not changed shape in twenty years: plates, housings, conduit by the length, crystal by the gram, scrap by the wagon. Mara had learned her figures from that board before she learned them anywhere else. She could read Tavin’s sevens from across the yard.
He stood at it now with the stub of chalk in his thick fingers and his sleeves rolled to the elbow, taking the count from Arlo, then from Fenno, then from her.
“Forty-one plates,” she said. “Six housings on property. Eight unknown under the tarp.”
He wrote it. Then he walked to the property pile, slowly, because the knee was bad at the end of a day, and picked up the housing with her tag on it.
She watched him read. He read the way he did everything, without hurry, his lips moving a little on the longer words. His eyebrows came down at seam. He turned the tag over to see if there was more on the back, and there was not, and he turned it front again.
“Seam,” he said.
“Under the bead. Or beside it.”
He never asked how she knew. He carried the housing to the bench under the work lamp, set it down, and ran his thumb along the weld. His thumbnail was cracked and black at the edge, and the thumb went slowly, pressing, as if reading a word in the dark.
“Pretty weld,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Factory work. Somebody knew what they were doing.” He tapped the casing once with a knuckle. It gave a dull, honest knock. “Clean metal lies about its seams. Check it anyway.” He reached into the tray on the bench and held out the fine file, handle first.
She took it.
The cool-edge test was the first thing he had ever taught her, the week he bought her contract, when she was sixteen and so angry at everything that she had refused to speak to him for four days. He had not seemed to mind the silence. On the fifth day he had put a file in her hand and a weld in front of her and said, Draw it. Light. Listen with your fingers. And she had drawn it, light, and felt the metal pass under the file, and understood for the first time that there was a way to know something about steel that never came through the graft at all.
A good weld, filed lightly, gave back an even resistance and an even chill, the heat of her hand drawn off at the same rate everywhere. Where the metal under the bead was flawed, a void, a crack, a place where the fusion had not taken, the file would skip, or the chill would change, or the sound under the teeth would go dull. Tavin called it reading the cool edge. He could do it with his eyes shut and a cup of tea in his other hand.
She set the file at the start of the bead and drew it toward herself. Rasp, even, bright. She moved along a finger’s width and drew again. Bright. Again. Bright. The metal was cold under her fingertips and it stayed cold, a clean cold.
Then she drew the file across a place two finger-widths past the point where the note had stuttered for her in the morning, and the sound under the teeth went dull. Not much. A small deadness, as if the steel had swallowed part of the rasp. The cold under her finger went soft at the same spot.
She drew the file back over it, to be sure. Dull.
“Dull there,” she said. “Not where you’re looking.”
Tavin had been watching the place where the seam joined a flange, which was where a pretty weld usually hid its sins. He looked down at her finger instead. He took the file from her without a word, set it where she had set it, and drew. He drew again. He put his thumb on the spot and held it, and she watched him count under his breath.
He grunted. He handed the file back to her. He let it stand.
That was all. No praise. In three years she had never heard him praise anything but a meal, and that only when he had cooked it himself. A grunt and a file returned was the whole of his answer, and she took it and put it in the place where she kept such things.
“Cold tray,” he said. “We’ll cut it in the morning and see what’s under.”
He picked up the housing and carried it to the cold tray by the quench tank, the long iron trough where finished pieces waited overnight before anyone was allowed to call them done. He set it in carefully and turned it so her tag stayed on top, face up.
She went back to the board while he did it, because she had not looked at the back wall yet, and she always looked at the back wall.
Beside the day’s count, in a separate column with a box drawn around it, Tavin kept the yard’s heating debt. It was the amount the yard owed the Directorate’s energy office for heat it had drawn over the winter and not paid for, plus the penalty, plus the interest on the penalty. Every month he chalked the new figure under the old and drew a line between them. He never rubbed out the old figures. The column ran down the wall now almost to the floor.
This month’s figure was larger than last month’s. Larger by more than it had been the month before.
She stood looking at it with her arms folded. The yard did honest work and the yard was paid, slowly, by offices that took their time. The yard also kept the heat on in the bunk room where Arlo and Fenno slept, and in the kitchen where Tavin cooked for whoever was there at supper, and in the narrow room over the office where she had slept for three years. Heat cost more each tithe. The quota fell each tithe. Somewhere between those two lines lived the column on the wall.
“Can the yard pay before winter?” she asked.
Tavin came back from the quench tank wiping his hands on his apron. He looked at the column and then at her, and his face did the thing it did, closing up like a shop at night.
“The yard’s debts are the yard’s business,” he said. “Your credit is yours.”
Her credit was the money her apprenticeship contract set aside for her each month, a little at a time, which she could spend on tools or food or doctors and which would one day, if she lived long enough and spent little enough, pay for a forge of her own and a room where Pell could sleep that was not a municipal dormitory. It was the most private thing she had after the graft. He had never once asked her how much was in it. She suspected he knew to the coin.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one I’ve got.”
He went to the bench and began putting the files back in their rack, each in its slot, largest to smallest. Without looking at her he said, “What did you hear in it? The housing.”
She hesitated. He seldom asked. When he did, it was usually like this, sideways, his hands busy and his eyes somewhere else, so that she could pretend he had not asked if she wanted to.
“A high tone,” she said. “Steady. A stutter at the end. And under it, very low, something older. Like the note it had before it was welded.”
He put the last file in the rack.
“Stress,” he said.
There was a word she had wanted to say instead. She had wanted to say it was telling me, or I heard it break, or something worse and truer that she had no words for. She did not say any of it. She said nothing, and Tavin nodded as though nothing was what he had expected, and that was the end of it.
He took his coat from the hook. “Lamp stays lit,” he said. “Sweep before you go up. Lock the cage.”
“I know.”
“I know you know.” He went out through the gate, and she heard his uneven step on the cobbles until the street noise covered it.
The yard was very quiet without him. Arlo and Fenno had gone to the bunk room. The melt furnace ticked as it cooled, a slow irregular sound like a clock that had lost interest. The work lamp threw a yellow circle over the bench and left the rest of the yard in the blue dusk that came after Hearth had gone down behind the towers.
She swept. She swept the bench and the floor around it and the long aisle between the bins, gathering filings and grit and a bent bolt into the pan. It was the part of the day she liked best, though she would not have said so: the yard put back in order, every tool in its rack, every pile under its tarp, nothing left to fall over in the dark.
When she was done she went back to the wall.
The chalk column of the heating debt ran down in Tavin’s square figures, month under month. She read it from the top, idly at first, then carefully. Most of the figures were sharp. One, about two-thirds of the way down, from the second winter after the fire, was smudged past reading. A thumb had gone across it, or a sleeve, or the chalk had simply failed on a damp day and flaked off. She could see the line Tavin had drawn above it and the line below. The figure between was a grey blur.
She leaned close and tried to read it in the lamp’s slant. A one, perhaps, or a seven. The rest was gone.
Someone could have wiped it. Tavin, to hide a bad month. A creditor’s clerk, come to inspect the books and careless with his coat. Nobody at all. She could not tell, and not being able to tell bothered her the way the strip of dark metal under the tarp bothered her: a thing with no tone.
She took the pencil from her pocket and copied the column onto the back of her left hand, small, month by month, leaving a gap where the smudge was. Then she sat on the bench for a while under the lamp and looked at the numbers on her skin.
She did not know what she would do with them. She knew only that a figure nobody could read was a figure nobody could argue with, and that the column would keep growing whether anyone read it or not.
The housing sat in the cold tray with her tag on top. Somewhere under its pretty bead there was a dull spot two finger-widths long, and in the morning Tavin would cut it open and they would both see.
She locked the cage, checked the gate bar twice, and climbed the stairs to her room. Before she slept she washed the numbers off her hand, then lay awake and wrote them out again from memory on the back of a parts receipt, smudged figure and all. She left the blank where it was and set the receipt under the lamp, where it would be the first thing she saw in the morning.