Tavin sat on a crate beside the bench with a yard tally sheet on his knee and a pencil behind his ear.
It was evening. The red light through the window had gone darker. Eshel had taken the trace back to the yard bench to start on the scrap sheet; Mara could hear the lathe through the wall. The two tables were gone. The back room was small again: the cot, the stool, the crate, the bench along the wall where Tavin kept the yard’s spare ledgers.
Mara sat on the bench’s edge with her dressed arm in her lap. Someone had left a lamp burning on the ledger shelf, and its small yellow flame looked strange against the red in the window.
“Tell me,” Tavin said. “What you remember. All of it. From the cradle.”
He took the pencil from behind his ear. He had unwound the linen from his right hand for this, Mara saw; the palm underneath was blistered and red, and he held the pencil gingerly between thumb and two fingers, but he held it.
“Everything?”
“Everything you can find,” Tavin said. “Every sensation. Eshel has the readings. What it felt like. What you tasted, what you smelled, what you heard that wasn’t on a gauge.” He wrote a heading at the top of the tally sheet. Pulse. Hearth. Day 9. Mara, dictated. “I’ll write. You talk.”
