Pell’s voice came through the speaker grille one numbered line at a time.
Mara sat in the yard’s back room with her good hand on the grille. She had come down from the shrine at the fourth hour of the afternoon, after the quorum, after Cant had disconnected itself from the Custodian’s route with a long sound through the plate like a bar being drawn from a door. Sera had flown her down. She had walked across the frozen yard to the office and sat at the link desk and asked for Pell.
He was at the dormitory. On the household network’s line, the one clause 31 had tried to disconnect and Tavin had kept live.
Through the grille, behind his voice, Mara could hear the dormitory in its afternoon hush. A cough somewhere along the long room. The creak of iron bedsteads where the smallest children had been put down to nap. The slow tick of the network’s slate on the dormitory roof, relayed down the line, where forty-odd houses reported their temperatures once an hour. She had never heard it before. It sounded like a clock with a stammer.
Pell had been up since before the fleet landed. She could hear that too. His voice had the thin careful flatness it got when he was too tired to be anything but exact.
