She cleared the wall. She did it slowly, with the rag, one cross at a time, and before she rubbed out each one she copied it into the notebook.
This time she wrote them as steps. She ruled a page and wrote the failures down in order, the way she would write the steps of a procedure: the lamp, its date, the days since the one before. Sable. Sorrel. The gap. Whitlow. Then, below them, after a line, the listed systems the curve had passed or was passing: Lorn, with its three-percent rise little more than a year ago. Then the next step on the line.
Hearth.
She underlined it twice.
When the wall was clean except for the debt column and the chalk letters above the bench, she sat down on her stool with the notebook open on her knee and looked at the page. A route. That was what it looked like, written that way: a route from the outer edge inward, step after step, like a delivery list or a dock schedule, with Hearth one stop from the end.
Tavin came in from the trough and sat on the other stool at the bench with a cup of the yard’s black tea. He drank half of it. Then he reached over without asking and turned the notebook on her knee so he could read it.
He read the page slowly. His lips moved on the lamp names. When he got to the bottom, to Hearth with its two lines under it, he stopped reading.
He set the cup down on the bench.
He did not pick it up again. She watched his hand rest beside it, the thick cracked fingers spread on the wood, and the tea went on steaming between them and he left it untouched.
“Did you copy this from the register,” he said, “or from the wall?”
“The wall.”
“Why the wall?”
“Because the register’s missing two. There’s a gap. Two years where the margin’s empty, and the next failure starts in the middle.” She showed him the short line and the word check. “The wall had the gap filled with where the line would have gone. The register doesn’t.”
“Then it’s a guess,” Tavin said.
“It’s a route,” Mara said. “Routes can be checked.”
He looked at her. She made herself hold it.
“Somebody can go and look,” she said. “At the lamps that failed, at the order they failed in. Somebody can go to Lorn and see if the rise came first. Somebody can check whether the gap is two failures or one. A guess is something you can’t check. This you can.”
Tavin was quiet. Outside, the carters had loaded their conduit and the wagon was rolling out through the gate with a long grinding of iron rims on cobbles. Arlo shouted something about a chain. The everyday noise of the yard went on all around them, and Tavin sat inside it with his hand on the bench beside his cooling tea.
When he spoke again his voice was careful. She had heard him use that voice before, but rarely: when he was handling something he thought might break, a cracked casting, an old pressure vessel, a piece of Founder glass.
“Hearth doesn’t go dark because the Low Brace is poor,” he said.
She waited.
“People will say that. When it starts. They’ll say the Directorate let it go because the Low Brace doesn’t pay. Because the rich have their orchards and their own feeds and they don’t care what happens to the scrapyards.” He looked at the page. “That’s not why. If it goes dark, it goes dark because somebody chose the order.”
The word went through her. Chose.
“Who?” she said.
He kept it to himself. He sat with his hand still on the bench, the fingers motionless, and his eyes on the bottom of the page where Hearth was underlined twice, and he did not say who. She had the feeling, strong and sudden, that he could have; that the name, or the outline of it, was right there behind his closed face, and that he had decided, a long time ago, that it would stay there.
“You know,” she said.
“I know what I’ve heard. Which isn’t the same.” He took his hand off the bench at last and picked up the cup and found it had gone cold and set it down again. “And what I’ve heard isn’t mine to tell.”
“Whose is it?”
He gave no answer.
She turned the notebook back toward herself. She looked at the route, step by step, and at the gap, and then at the place where the curve on the wall had been gathering, the point beside the Meridian dot where she had drawn the question mark and then rubbed it out.
“There was something in the middle,” she said. “On the wall. Where the line was going. Beside Meridian, a little below.” She looked at him. “There’s something there, isn’t there. Something the chart doesn’t show. A well, or a—”
“Not today,” Tavin said.
He stood up. He picked up his cold tea and poured it into the bucket under the bench and set the cup on its hook.
“I have to check the furnace,” he said, and went out.
She heard his uneven step cross the yard to the melt pit shed, heard the shed door scrape open, then shut. He had checked the furnace an hour ago. She knew it, and he knew she knew it.
She sat on the stool for a long time. The noise of the yard had changed: the wagon was gone, the hands had gone in for their meal, and the only sounds were the slow tick of the cooling melt and, somewhere beyond the fence, the Tern’s hull creaking as the sun warmed it.
She looked at the route again, at the step above Hearth. Lorn. A three-percent rise little more than a year ago, and nothing written after it, because the register’s last volume stopped before Lorn’s story did. If the route held, Lorn was already in its late dawns. Its unstable dawns. Somewhere under that lamp, Sera’s sister was reading a gauge every night for the heat log and getting twelve children to sleep in a cold room by having them sing.
The evacuation lists, Sera had said. The Compact makes them. Teachers do not rate high on the work records.
She thought of walking out to the Tern and showing Sera the page. She thought of what Sera’s face would do when she read Lorn one step above Hearth, and how Sera would say fine in her clipped voice, and then go very quiet, and then begin to count something. Mara stayed where she was, for now. A page in her own notebook, copied from a clerk’s margin and a chalk wall, was not a thing to hand someone whose sister lived under the next lamp on the list. She would need more than that. She would need to be able to say how she knew.
She took out her pencil.
At the foot of the page, below the route, below Hearth with its two lines, she wrote a question. She did not write it in her measuring hand, the small square careful letters she used for tones and faults and counts, the hand meant for other people to read and check. She wrote it in her plain hand, quick and sloping, the way she would have written a note to Pell. The pencil was worn to a stub, and the graphite skidded on the cheap paper, but she kept going.
Who chose the order?
She looked at it with the pencil stub still in her fingers, while the lamp over the gate buzzed and a cart went by in the lane. It was only a question, nothing she had heard in metal or found in a margin, and it sat at the bottom of the page in her ordinary handwriting, small and unprotected, and she could not take it back now that she had written it.
The yard gate creaked.
She looked up. A handcart was coming through the gateway, pulled by a woman in a grey shawl. On the cart, roped down with a length of clothesline, sat the widow’s pump, its motor housing scabbed with old paint. The widow from Coil Stair. Ines Toller. She was a small woman, about forty, with a thin worn face and dark hair pulled back hard under the shawl, and she stopped the cart just inside the gate and stood holding the handles and looking toward the bench, waiting to be seen.
Mara looked at the clock on the office wall. It was the day. She had forgotten it was the day.
She looked at the notebook on her knee one more time: the route, the gap, Hearth underlined twice, and the question at the bottom in her plain hand.
Then she closed it, put it in her coat, and got up off the stool, and went across the yard to meet the cart.