She took her arm off the blanket.
It was the hardest thing she had done all night. The moment her weight came off it, the wool lifted a little on the seam, and a lick of blue showed along the edge, and she thought it will catch now, it will catch and it will be my fault. She did not stop. She reached into the cabin past Sera’s shoulder with the small knife from her apron, and took hold of the man’s sleeve at the wrist, where the stitches had begun to come loose.
He was already pushing the strip toward her. With his other hand, his right hand, the steady one, he had got his fingers under the loose end, and as her knife went through the heavy thread he pulled. The strip came out of the sleeve in one long movement, like a blade out of a sheath, and he pressed it into her palm and closed her fingers over it with his own.
It was cold.
That was the first thing. The fire was close enough to scorch the wool of the blanket; the air in the hatchway was hot; the man’s hand over hers was hot and wet with sweat or blood. And the strip in her palm was cool, cool like a river stone, like metal that has been lying in shade. She could feel its edges against her fingers. It was about as long as her hand from wrist to fingertip, a little more, and two fingers wide, and thin, thinner than her little finger, flat and black and absolutely straight.
The graft hummed. Steady. A low clean note, with nothing broken in it.
“Find the ash gate,” the man said. His face was very close to hers now; he had leaned forward against the harness, and his breath was fast and shallow. “At Lorn. The ash gate at Lorn. Do you understand? Lorn.”
“Lorn,” she said. “The ash gate.”
“Don’t let them call it scrap.” His fingers tightened over hers. “Whatever happens. And keep the blanket on the seam. Don’t look at the light.”
“What light?”
He did not answer. His eyes had gone past her, up, out of the hatch.
The field went white.
A beam of hard white light swept across the scrub from above, blinding, the light of a lamp much stronger than any in the Low Brace. It came across the burning grass in a long slow line, turning the smoke to silver, and it found the wreck and stopped, and the whole hatchway blazed. Mara could not see. She could hear something above them, a high thin whine, like a large insect.
“Drone,” Sera said.
She let go of the man’s shoulder and took Mara by the back of the collar, in one fist, and pulled.
Mara went backward out of the hatch. She hit the scrub hard, on her shoulder, and before she could get up Sera had dragged her sideways, fast, under the canted frame of the ship where its tail stood up off the ground. There was a gap there, between the frame and the earth, perhaps half a meter high, black with shadow, and Sera shoved her into it and came in after her and lay half across her, one arm pinning her to the ground.
“Don’t move,” Sera said in her ear. “It’s looking for movement.”
The white beam lay across the wreck. Mara could see it through the gap in the frame: the field lit like noon, the burning grass, the smoking blanket on the seam, the open hatch. The whine of the drone hung overhead. It stayed where it was and held its light on the cabin.
Through the gap she could see into the hatchway. She could see the man in the seat.
He had turned his head to look up at the light. His face in the glare was white and very calm again, as calm as when he had asked about Hearth. Then he looked down at his belt. His right hand moved, slowly, to his waist, where there was a small black box clipped to the harness with a switch on top, a plain toggle under a hinged guard.
Mara saw the movement through the gap in the frame and understood what it was and could not stop it.
She tried. She pushed up against Sera’s arm and Sera held her down, hard, with all her weight, and said “No,” low and final, in her ear.
The man flipped up the guard with his thumb.
He looked toward the gap in the frame, toward the dark where Mara lay. He could not have seen her. He looked anyway, and his lips moved, and he began to say something, in a low clear voice, and she heard the first words of it.
“Mara. Tell your—”
His thumb came down on the switch.
The cabin filled with a hard, bright, colorless light, nothing like the drone’s white glare, coming from the console and the dark screens and the bulkhead, from everywhere at once. With it came a sound: a rush of static, enormous, a roar like water through a broken main, and under the roar a crackling, a frying, as every screen and circuit in the cabin burned at the same instant. The ship’s records. Everything it had stored, every log and chart and message, going up together in one bright second.
The light went out. The static stopped.
The cabin’s last panel went dark. The console was dark, the screens were dark, the little green running light that had glowed above the hatch was dark. In the drone’s white beam the cabin looked like a box of grey ash.
The man was still in his straps. He sat upright, as he had before, with his head a little forward now, his chin toward his chest, and his right hand had fallen from the switch to rest in his lap. He did not move.
Mara pushed against Sera’s arm again. Harder. She got her elbow under her and half rose, scraping her back on the frame.
“He’s gone,” Sera said. “Move.”
“He’s—I have to—”
“He’s gone.” Sera’s voice stayed flat. It went low and very quiet. “That box was for him as much as for the records. I’ve seen them before. Courier kit. You don’t come back from those.” She shifted her grip from Mara’s collar to her arm. “Move. Now. While it’s looking at the cabin and not at us.”
Mara’s hand was still closed around the strip. She had not let go of it through any of it: the drag out of the hatch, the fall on the scrub, Sera’s weight pinning her down. Her fingers ached around it. It lay in her fist, still cool, cool as shade, as if none of what had just happened had touched it.
Above them the drone’s whine changed pitch. The white beam lifted off the cabin. It swung away across the field, slowly, back the way it had come, sweeping the burning grass and the rusted conveyor frames, its light still on, still searching.
Mara lay with her cheek against the frozen scrub and counted, because counting was what she had. Three and a pause, as the knocking had gone. Three and a pause. Nobody inside the hull was keeping the count with her now. She kept it anyway, under her breath, until the whine overhead had thinned to nothing.
Sera stayed put until the light was a hundred meters off. Then she slid out from under the frame and pulled Mara after her and they crouched together in the shadow of the canted tail, breathing.
Mara looked back at the hatch.
The man sat in the seat with his chin on his chest. In the dark, with the drone’s light gone, she could barely see him; only the pale blur of his face, and his hand in his lap. He was quite still; under the hiss of the seam there was no other sound from him. She knew nothing about him but one name. Edrin. He had known hers. He had known her mother’s. He had begun to say something to her, Mara, tell your, and then he had pressed the switch.
She would never know what he had meant to say. Tell your brother. Tell your master. Tell your mother, even, as if Iona were somewhere to be told.
She looked down at the strip in her hand. Black, straight, cool. It was the heaviest thing she had ever held, and it weighed almost nothing.
Behind her the blanket on the seam had begun to smoke again, steadily now, a thick grey column rising into the dark. Out across the field the drone’s beam went on sweeping, the white light trailing across the frost. She could not stop looking at the hatch, and at the stillness of the man in the seat beside the dead console, and at the unfinished sentence he had left in the stale air of the cabin.