The conveyor fields began beyond the gap in the back fence, where the chain link had rusted through and been pushed aside years ago by children and scavengers. Mara went through it at a run with the blanket’s woven weight over her arm.
The ground was frozen scrub, hard and uneven under her boots, and the old conveyors ran across it in long rows, a mile of them, iron frames on iron legs with the belts long gone and the rollers rusted to their axles. She ran between two rows. On either side of her the frames went by like the ribs of some enormous dead animal.
Ahead, the glow had sharpened. It was no longer a soft orange haze but a ragged line of flame, low to the ground, running across the scrub in several directions at once. The grass was burning. It burned in lines, following the dry tussocks, small hissing fires a hand high, and between the lines the frozen ground steamed. The air tasted of scorched paint and something sharper, chemical, that caught at the back of her throat.
She came around the end of a conveyor row and saw the ship.
It lay in the scrub at the end of a long furrow it had ploughed in the frozen ground, perhaps a hundred meters long, a raw dark scar edged with smoking clods. The ship was narrow, much narrower than the Tern, a sharp grey dart of a thing with stubby wings, and it lay bent into the earth with its nose buried and its tail up, canted to one side. Around it, in a rough ring, lay the pieces of itself it had shed on the way down: panels, struts, a twisted fin, the long smoking cylinder of what must have been an engine, torn loose and flung twenty meters away. They made a kind of fence around the hull, a fence of wreckage.
Blue fire crawled along one seam of the hull. It was a low, flickering, unnatural blue, too clean for burning paint or grass, and it moved slowly along the welded joint where the cabin met the body, licking at the metal, as though it were looking for a way in.
The graft behind her ear gave a stutter.
She was not listening. She was nowhere near the hull; she had not touched it. And yet there it was, faint, at the very edge of her hearing: a catch, a hitch, like the first stutter in the valve housing in the shed, before it became a tone. Something in the wreck was under strain, and the strain was loud enough that she could hear it from twenty paces through the air.
It was not yet a tone. She did not wait for it to become one.
“Hold the seam!”
Sera’s voice, from the far side of the wreck. Mara turned. Sera came around the buried nose at a run, a cutting torch in one hand with its hose looped over her shoulder to a small tank on her back, and the coil of rescue line around her other arm, not just her wrist now but up to the elbow. Her face in the firelight was set and blank.
“Hold the seam,” Sera said again, pointing with the torch at the blue fire crawling along the cabin joint. “Smother it. Don’t stand on it.”
“I’m not standing on anything,” Mara said.
“Good. Keep not standing on anything.”
Mara shook out the blanket. It was heavy, the size of a small bed, coarse grey weave, and she held it by two corners and swung it up and over and down across the cabin seam where the blue fire ran, the way Tavin had taught her to throw it over a pan of burning oil: from above, all at once, no gaps.
The fire went out under it. For a moment. Then the wool began to smoke at one corner, a thin grey curl rising from where the blanket lay over the hottest part of the seam, and she smelled it, singed wool, a heavy animal smell.
She knelt and put her forearm on the edge of the blanket and pressed it down against the metal, sealing it. The heat came through her coat sleeve almost at once, through the weave and the sleeve and her shirt, and it was very hot, hotter than she had expected, the heat of metal that had been burning from the inside. She held it. She clenched her teeth and held it.
Sera had already moved to the hatch.
It was a small square hatch in the cabin’s side, just aft of where the blanket lay, and it had buckled in the crash: its frame was bent, its hinges twisted, one corner sprung outward and the rest jammed tight. Sera looked at it for perhaps two seconds. Then she lit the torch.
The flame came on with a hiss, a hard blue-white point, and she set it to the upper hinge.
She cut the way she had counted the jack strokes in the yard: steadily, without hurry, without any wasted movement. The torch went along the hinge pin in one slow pass, and the metal glowed and ran, and Sera counted quietly as she went. Mara could not hear the numbers, only the rhythm, a low murmur between the hiss of the torch and the smoking of the blanket. One pass. Sera adjusted her angle. A second pass. She kept the flame tilted away from the blanket the whole time, away from Mara’s arm, never letting the torch’s point swing toward the wool even when the hinge resisted and she had to lean.
The upper hinge parted. Sera moved to the lower.
Mara held the blanket. Her forearm burned. She thought, distantly, that she would have a mark there tomorrow, a red stripe, and that she would not mind.
Then, under her arm, through the blanket, through the hull, she felt something.
A tapping.
It was coming from inside the cabin. Through the metal, not through the air. She felt it in her arm where it pressed the blanket to the hull, and in the graft behind her ear, a series of small sharp knocks, metal on metal, like someone striking the inside of the hull with a tool. Knock. Knock. Knock. A pause. Knock. Knock. Knock.
It was patient. That was what struck her. It was not the frantic battering of someone trapped and panicking. It was regular, measured, deliberate, three knocks and a pause, three knocks and a pause, the way a person knocks when they have been at it for hours and expect to go on knocking for a long time more, and want whoever is outside to know that they can still count.
She heard it before she saw anything at all.
“Sera,” she said.
Sera did not look up from the torch. “I hear it.”
“Someone’s—”
“I hear it.” The torch went along the lower hinge. Sera leaned into it, her face lit blue-white, sweat running down from under her hair. The metal glowed and ran and dripped onto the scrub, hissing in the frost. “Two more seconds.”
Knock. Knock. Knock. The pause.
Mara found that she had begun to count with it. Under her breath, the way she counted everything. Three and a pause. Three and a pause. She had no reason for it. It seemed important that someone outside the hull was keeping the same count as whoever was inside it.
The lower hinge parted with a sharp crack.
The hatch shifted in its frame. It did not fall. It was still jammed at one corner, still held by the buckled frame, but it had moved, a finger’s width, and through the gap came a breath of air from inside the cabin, hot and stale and smelling of burned insulation and blood.
The tapping stopped.
Then it came again, faster now, closer to the gap. There was no pause in it now, only a rush of knocks, as though whoever was inside had heard the hinge go and understood what it meant.
Sera shut off the torch. In the sudden quiet, with the blue-white glare gone and only the orange of the grass fires around them, her face looked very tired and very young.
“Someone’s alive in there,” she said.
Mara looked at the gap in the hatch, at the darkness behind it, at the blanket under her arm, still smoking at the corner. Somewhere behind the blanket, along the seam, the blue fire was waiting for the wool to burn through. She could feel the heat climbing under her forearm.
The smell of singed wool was stronger now. The weave under her forearm had gone stiff with heat, and through it she could feel the metal ticking, small sharp sounds of expansion, the hull’s whole skin shifting as the fire behind the seam worked at it.
She could not tell how long the blanket would hold, or how long the cabin had before the fire found its way inside. She pressed her arm down harder and listened to the knocking in the hull, and waited for Sera to tell her what to do next.