The blanket caught.
Mara saw it happen from the shadow of the ship’s tail. The corner where the seam ran hottest had been smoking steadily since she lifted her arm, and now, all at once, the smoke turned to flame: a small bright ring that opened in the middle of the weave and spread outward, eating the wool, until the whole corner was a circle of fire with a black hole at its center. The ring widened. The blanket’s edge curled up and blackened and fell apart, and the woven wool came away from the seam in flakes, black flakes that lifted on the heat and drifted off into the dark like ash from a chimney.
Under it, the blue fire on the seam came back, stronger.
Mara started forward. She was not sure what she meant to do. Pull the blanket back. Beat it out. Get back to the hatch and the man in the seat, who could not be helped, she knew he could not be helped, and still.
Sera’s hand closed on her arm above the elbow and stopped her.
“No,” Sera said.
“The fire—”
“Will burn what it burns.” Sera pulled her back without roughness and without any give at all, the way the rescue line would pull. “There’s nobody in there to save now. You go near that seam, I’ll be cutting you out of the next hatch.”
They backed off, into the dark between two conveyor rows, thirty meters from the wreck, and crouched there behind a rusted roller frame. From there they could see the ship clearly: the canted hull, the open hatch, the seam burning blue along the cabin joint, the last of the blanket in black flakes on the scrub.
The Directorate came ten minutes later.
They came in two wagons and a long low car, from the west, across the fields, with their lamps blazing. They came without fire gear. Mara looked for it as the wagons stopped and the crews jumped down: the hoses, the foam tanks, the long hooked poles that the dock fire crews carried, the asbestos coats. There were none. The crews came down off the wagons in grey Directorate uniforms with rifles in their hands, and they spread out across the field in a line, and their rifles were pointed at the wreck.
At the cabin.
Mara watched them come. Twelve, she counted. Fourteen. They moved fast and quietly, as if they had done this before, and within a few minutes they had strung a line of posts and tape around the whole field, a wide rough circle with the wreck at its center, faster than the grass fires could spread. The tape was yellow and black. It said, every meter, DIRECTORATE OF ENERGY — RESTRICTED.
A man walked up to the tape near where they crouched. He wore an officer’s cap and a long grey coat, and he carried a handset in one hand, its cord looped to a pack on his belt. He stopped at the tape and looked out into the dark between the conveyor rows, sweeping it with a hand lamp, and the light went over the roller frame and over Mara and Sera crouched behind it.
He saw them. He seemed unsurprised.
“Engine accident,” he said, loudly, in the voice of a man reading from a card. “Stand back. Nothing here is recoverable.”
Mara stood up.
Sera hissed something at her and grabbed for her sleeve and missed. Mara walked to the tape. She could not have said why. Her legs took her. She stood at the tape, an arm’s length from the officer, and the lamp light was in her face.
“Is anyone inside?” she said.
The officer looked at her. He had a broad plain face, clean-shaven, unremarkable. His eyes were tired.
“Stand back,” he said.
“There was a man in the cabin. A pilot. Is anyone going to—”
“Stand back.”
He said it exactly as he had said it before, with the same weight on the same word. His voice stayed even. He did not answer the question. He looked at her the way the tithe clerk had looked at Pell: as if she had asked something that was not on his sheet.
Sera’s hand closed on her arm again and drew her back, away from the tape, into the dark behind the roller frame.
From there they watched.
The crews went to the wreck. Four of them, with rifles held across their chests. They went past the seam where the fire was burning, straight to the hatch. Mara watched one of them pick up the hatch cover from where it had fallen on the scrub, the cover Sera had cut free, and lift it, and two of them together fit it back into the buckled frame, roughly, at an angle, closing the cabin up again. They did not look inside or shine a lamp in. They closed it.
Then the officer at the tape lifted his handset and spoke into it.
“Field secured. Courier class vessel, unregistered. Engine failure on approach. No survivors. Nothing recoverable.” A pause while someone answered. “Engine accident. Yes. Release it as an engine accident.”
The words came across the field hard and clear in the cold air. Engine accident. No survivors. Nothing recoverable. Mara had heard them before. She had read them, word for word, on the printed notices the Directorate posted on the district gate after a crop-dome fire or a transport crash: An engine accident has occurred. There were no survivors. Nothing is recoverable. Stand back. The same words, the same order. They had a card for it.
They had not opened the cabin. They had closed it, and then announced what was inside.
Sera’s hand was still on her arm. It had not moved. Mara could feel the grip through her coat sleeve, steady and hard.
“They’ve decided what it was,” Sera said. Her voice had gone level and toneless, as toneless as the officer’s. “Don’t be the one who argues with them.”
“He was alive. When we got there. He was alive.”
“I know.”
“They didn’t even look.”
“I know.” Sera held on. “I’ve seen this. I’ve seen them do this. They decide first, and then they look, and then what they see is what they decided.” She paused. “You argue with them now, out here, in the dark, with fourteen rifles and a field taped off and nobody watching, and you’ll be the next thing that’s nothing recoverable.”
Mara swallowed what she had been going to say.
The fire on the seam had settled to a low steady blue. The grass fires were going out one by one as the crews stamped them; a field on fire drew eyes, Mara thought.
At her feet, in the scrub where she had backed away, lay a charred scrap of grey wool. A corner of the blanket. It had blown off the seam when the ring opened, and landed here, and gone out. It was the size of her hand, blackened along one edge, singed brown across the rest, and it still had a few threads of the original weave showing in the middle, coarse and grey.
She looked at it. Tavin’s blanket. She had taken it off its hook by the stove and run with it across the field, and now it was gone, and this was what was left.
She left it in the grass.
She left it because she could not carry both. That was how it felt. Inside her coat, against her ribs, pressed under her shirt where she had pushed it when Sera dragged her out of the hatch, was the strip. She could feel it there. Cool against her skin. Its edges lying along her side. Every time she breathed it moved a little, and every time it moved she felt the low steady hum of it in the graft, under everything else, very faint.
The officer at the tape turned. He swept his hand lamp across the dark again, slowly, and it found the roller frame and stopped there.
“You,” he called. “On the field. Who was on the field before the crews?”
Mara kept quiet.
The lamp held on her. She stood behind the roller frame with her hands at her sides and her coat buttoned and her face in the light, and she said nothing at all. Beside her, Sera kept her eyes on the officer. The strip pressed cool against her ribs under her coat.
“I asked who was on the field,” the officer said.
Silence. The fire hissed on the seam. Somewhere far off, the last siren wound down.
The officer looked at her a moment longer. Then he lowered the lamp and spoke into his handset, too low to hear, and turned back toward the wreck. Whatever he had said, it was short. Mara stood in the dark with the strip against her ribs and her mouth shut, and waited to learn what the crews did with a witness who kept it that way.