Sera put her shoulder to the hatch and it came free all at once.
It dropped outward on its last twisted corner and swung down and hit the scrub with a clang, and the hot, stale breath of the cabin rolled out over them. That was the first thing Mara noticed, kneeling by the smoking blanket with her arm still pressed across the seam. The air smelled of scorched insulation, but there was no smoke in it. A ship that had come down burning, that had shed its engine across the field and was still licking blue fire along its cabin joint, and the fire had not gone inside.
Sera leaned in with the torch held low, unlit, and a hand lamp she had taken from her belt.
Mara could see past her shoulder. The cabin was small, smaller than any she had seen, the size of a closet: one seat, a narrow console, a bank of screens, all dark but one, which still glowed with a navigation plot, a thin line across a grey chart, and behind the seat a bulkhead with a door into the crushed hull aft. It was intact. The walls were whole, the console was whole, the seat frame stood upright and clean. All around it, outside the hull, the ship had come apart into a fence of wreckage. Inside, it might have landed on a dock.
“The engine was cut loose,” Sera said, half to herself. She ran the lamp over the rear bulkhead. “Before it hit. Somebody cut the engine loose on purpose, so the fire wouldn’t come into the cabin.” She lowered the lamp. “That’s not a merchant’s trick.”
There was a man in the seat.
He was strapped in with a harness across both shoulders and his waist, and he sat upright, with his head turned toward the hatch, toward the light. He was perhaps fifty, maybe older; it was hard to tell. A narrow lined face, grey-stubbled, very pale. Dark hair cut short. A plain grey flight suit, torn at the knee. And below the knee, where his left leg should have been resting on the cabin floor, a panel from the console had come down across it and pinned it, a heavy grey slab of metal, and the leg beneath it was twisted at an angle that made Mara look away and then make herself look back.
His left arm lay along the armrest. Sewn into the sleeve of his flight suit, along the forearm, was a long narrow strip of something black. It had been stitched in with heavy thread, like a patch on a work coat, and it lay against his forearm dark and dull.
He was looking at them. His eyes were open and clear.
“Does Hearth still rise on time?” he said.
His voice was hoarse and very calm. It was the voice of a man asking about the weather on a long journey, the polite question one asks a stranger at a station.
Mara had no answer. She said the true thing.
“It does,” she said. “Mostly.”
He laughed. It was a short cracked sound, and there was very little humor in it and a great deal of something else, something that made his face go tight around the eyes. He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, they were wet.
“Mostly,” he said. “Yes. Mostly.”
Sera was already inside the hatch, crouched beside the seat, her hands going over the harness buckles, checking each one. She looked at the panel across his leg and kept her hands off it. She looked at his face, at his color, at the dark stain spreading across the seat beneath him.
“Hold still,” she said. “You’re bleeding on my cut.” She said it the way she had said whoever built this hated couplings: dry, short, almost bored. But her hands on the buckles were very gentle, and very steady, and she kept her body between him and the gap where the blue fire showed along the seam.
“I’m not going anywhere,” the man said.
“Good. Don’t start.” Sera tested the last buckle. “What do I call you?”
“Edrin.” He breathed out through his teeth. “Just Edrin. It’s enough.”
Mara shifted on her knees. The blanket under her forearm had stopped smoking for the moment, but she could feel the heat climbing through it, and she pressed down harder. As she moved, she spoke, half to Sera: “How long does the seam hold if I let go?”
And the graft woke.
It was faint, a low steady hum like a wire touched by wind, and it came from the cabin. From the metal of the cabin. When she spoke, the cabin’s walls had picked up her voice and given something back to the graft, the way the valve housing in the shed had given her the bell.
Edrin turned his head toward her.
He turned it sharply, all at once, as if he had heard his name called across a crowded room. His eyes went past Sera’s shoulder to Mara, kneeling at the hatch, and something happened in his face. It opened. All the calm went out of it and something else came in, sudden and enormous, a kind of relief so strong it looked like pain.
“Iona’s,” he said.
Mara stayed where she was.
“You’re Iona’s,” he said again. He was staring at her, at the side of her head, at the place behind her left ear. “I can hear it. The lining. I’d know it anywhere. Iona.” His voice cracked on the name. “You came. I told them you’d come. I told them—”
He had mistaken her. She understood it before he finished speaking. He had heard the graft, or felt it, or whatever it was he had done, and he had thought she was her mother. He thought Iona Venn was kneeling at the hatch of his broken ship with a fire blanket over her arm.
“My name is Mara,” she said.
He stopped.
“Mara,” he said. He said it back to her, slowly, as though trying it on. “Mara.”
And his face changed again. The relief went out of it, all of it, at once, and what came in behind it was urgency: a sharpness, a terrible fast attention, his eyes going over her face as if searching for something written there.
“Are you Iona’s?” he said. “Her—are you hers?”
“Her daughter,” Mara said. Her voice sounded strange to her, thin and far away. “Her daughter. Mara.”
He closed his eyes. His lips moved. She could not hear what he said.
Sera looked from him to Mara and back. She did not ask anything. She had her hand on the man’s shoulder, holding him back against the seat, and she was watching the panel across his leg and the dark stain on the seat and the slow grey color coming into his face.
He opened his eyes.
“How long since,” he said. “Since she—”
“Three years,” Mara said. “The transport fire. Three years.”
Something went across his face that she could not read. He did not say I’m sorry, or I know, or any of the things people said. He looked at her for another moment with that sharp terrible attention, and then he tried to lift his left arm.
It came up off the armrest a hand’s width and stopped. She saw the effort it cost him: his jaw locked, his breath went out in a hiss, the cords in his neck stood out. The arm hung there, trembling. In the sleeve the black strip shifted with the movement, and Mara saw it clearly for the first time in the hand lamp’s glow: black, dull, perfectly straight, a little longer than her hand, lying against the grey lining of the seat like a stripe of shadow. The heavy stitches that held it had started to come loose at the wrist end.
The graft hummed again, very faintly. This time it came from the strip.
“Take it,” the man said. His arm was shaking. “Take it. Cut it out. Please.”
“Hold still,” Sera said.
“I can’t hold still. There isn’t time.” He was looking only at Mara now. “Take it. And don’t let them call it scrap. Whatever they say. Whatever they call it. Don’t let them put it in a bin and call it scrap.”
Behind her, on the seam, under the blanket, Mara felt the heat jump. The wool under her forearm went suddenly hotter, so hot she gasped, and a thin new thread of smoke rose from the corner.
The fire had found a way along the seam toward the hatch.
Mara looked at the black strip in its sleeve, shaking in the lamp light, a hand’s width from the man’s wrist. She looked at the seam, at the blanket, at the smoke. She looked at Sera.
Sera had seen the smoke too. Her face did not change, but her hand tightened on the man’s shoulder, and she said, very low, “Now, Mara.”
The man in the seat was still holding his arm up for her, trembling, the strip within reach. His strength would not hold much longer. Neither would the blanket.