Anwen came off the transfer shuttle onto Lorn’s Reach with the fixture case in both hands.
She did not let anyone carry it. The shuttle’s crew had offered, at the hatch; a porter at Lorn’s dock had offered, at the bottom of the ramp. She had shaken her head both times. The case held the field mount and the error card and the probe generator and the sensor set with its custody sheet, signed, which Mara had seen before it left Cinder. It held the work. You carried the work yourself.
She had read the well’s figure on the shuttle. Twice. Mara had sent it down the link from Meridian an hour before landing, as promised: the pressure at the well’s throat, climbing, measured on site by hand. Anwen had read it and sat with it in her lap for the rest of the descent. She had not answered yet.
Lorn’s forge hall was at the top of the Founders’ Quarter, a short climb from the dock. Anwen had never been there. Mara had described it to her, once, at the yard bench: the cradle where she had stood at eighty-one, the six-channelled heart she had built, the control room above. Anwen had imagined it larger.
