The officer did nothing. That was what frightened her most, later. He turned away, and the crews went on working at the wreck, and nobody came across the tape for them.
They stayed behind the roller frame while the wagon lamps moved back and forth across the field. An hour, perhaps more. Sera would not move while the crews were still spread across the field, and Mara made no argument. They crouched in the dark with their backs to the cold iron and watched the grey uniforms go back and forth in the lamp light, and the cold came up out of the frozen ground into Mara’s knees and her feet and her hands.
Another wagon came, with a long flatbed and a crane arm. More sirens started in the Directorate quarter as it came, a fresh round of them, rising one after another into the night, slow and lazy and far away.
And under the sirens, the strip began to sound.
She felt it first. A change in the faint hum against her ribs: the steady low note stirring, lifting, as if something had touched it. Then it was in the graft, clear and close, not a hum anymore but a melody. A short run of notes. Rising, then falling, then resting.
She knew it before she had finished hearing it.
Her hand went to her ear. She did not decide to move it; it went there on its own, the way a hand goes to a burn.
It was the lullaby. Not all of it. One line. The third line, the last one, the one where the song lets go: cool them, let them rest. It came out of the black metal under her coat in a voice that was not a voice, a pure thin tone, each note exactly where her mother had always put it. She had not heard that line sung in her mother’s exact pitch since the night before the transport fire. Her mother had sung it to Pell that night, in the flat over the pump house, with her work coat already on and her trunk in the hall. Mara had been in the next room, pretending to be asleep, and had heard it through the wall.
And now the strip sang it, once, under the Directorate’s sirens, in a field taped off with yellow and black.
The whole verse ran through her head in the rhythm of the line, the way it always did, a song she could not hear only part of:
Hush, the sparks come down, fold them into a nest, cool them, let them rest.
Only the third line came out of the strip, and only once: its share of the eight seconds, exactly. She had no need to count. Then it stopped. The tone faded to the low steady hum again, and the hum went on against her ribs, patient and faint, as if nothing had happened.
Her hand stayed at her ear.
Sera was looking at her. In the dark Mara could see only the outline of her face and the glint of her eyes.
“Is it hot?” Sera said, low. “The thing you took. You put your hand to your head.”
“No,” Mara said. “It’s singing.”
Sera was silent for a moment. Then: “That’s worse.”
The crane on the flatbed swung its arm over the wreck. The crews were fixing chains to the hull. They were going to lift it, Mara understood, the whole ship, with the man still strapped in the seat inside it, and carry it away on the flatbed, and in the morning there would be a notice on the district gate saying engine accident, and the field would be empty, and the tape would come down, and that would be all.
“Now,” Sera said. “While they’re watching the crane.”
She moved off along the frame, then stopped, stooped, and picked something out of the scrub: the charred corner of the blanket, the scrap Mara had left in the grass. Sera pushed it inside her jacket without a word. Rescue service, Mara would learn, never left things on a field that could tell someone who had been there.
They went back along the conveyor rows. Sera led. She steered clear of the gap in the yard fence and went north, away from it, along the rows, keeping the rusted frames between them and the field, moving fast and low. Mara followed with one hand pressed over the strip under her coat, holding it against her ribs.
Behind them the sirens faded. The fires on the field settled to a dull glow, then to nothing, and the last thing Mara saw when she looked back was the crane’s arm against the sky, lifting.
Sera took them out of the fields at the north end, through a culvert under the old conveyor road, and into the Low Brace by a back lane Mara had never used. It was the deep part of the night now, the hour when even the dormitory blocks were dark. The lanes were empty. Gates were closed. Stalls were shuttered and dark, their awnings rolled. Their footsteps were the only sound.
Mara walked in silence, and her head was full.
She thought about the widow’s pipe, peeled open above the child’s bed, and the clock on the kitchen wall reading eleven minutes. She thought about the dates on the wall, the curve leaning inward through Hearth, the question in her notebook in her plain hand. She thought about the envelope in the range, the slanted quick letters going brown, the word that might have been ordinary. She thought about a man in a grey flight suit with his chin on his chest, who had known her mother’s name and her own, and had started to say tell your, and had not finished.
She thought: everything is connected, and I do not know how.
At the bottom of the lane stood one of the district’s old dawn gates, a heavy iron grille across the lane where the Low Brace met the market quarter, locked from the last bell to first light, with a guard’s hut beside it. The guard was awake, a young man with a rifle across his knees and a mug in his hand, sitting in the hut’s lit doorway. He stood up when he saw them.
Sera kept her pace, one hand on the strap of her bag. She walked up to the grille with her flight card already out of her jacket, held up in her fingers, the way a person shows a card they have shown a thousand times.
“Freight pilot,” she said. “Tern, docked at Rusk’s yard, Low Brace. My mechanic.” She jerked her head at Mara. “We were walking off a bad landing.”
The guard looked at the card. He looked at Sera. He looked at Mara, at her coat buttoned to the throat, at her hand pressed to her ribs, at the burned cuff of her sleeve. Mara kept her coat closed. She kept her hand where it was. She thought the guard must be able to hear the strip, must be able to hear it humming against her ribs through the coat, it seemed so loud in the graft. He did not.
“There was a crash,” the guard said. “Out on the fields. Engine accident.”
“I heard,” said Sera.
He handed back the card. He unlocked the grille and swung it open, and they went through, and he locked it behind them.
The yard was dark when they came to it, except for one light.
The work lamp was lit over the bench. Turned low, a yellow glow in the black yard, and under it Tavin was sitting on his stool with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped. He was dressed. His boots were on. He had the look of a man who had been sitting there for a long time, without moving, waiting for something to come through the gate. He lifted his head when they came in.
And at the gate, just outside it, in the lane, a car was parked.
It was long and black and low, a Directorate car, the kind with closed windows. Its engine was off. Its lights were off. It sat there in the dark lane beside the yard gate, motionless, as though it had been there for some time, and Mara could not see whether there was anyone inside it.
She stopped in the gateway. Sera stopped beside her.
Tavin did not get up. He looked at Mara, at her burned cuff, at her hand pressed over her ribs. Then he looked past her, through the gate, at the black car in the lane.
“How long has it been there?” Mara said.
“An hour,” Tavin said. “Since before the sirens stopped.”
She looked at the car. She looked at Tavin, sitting under the lamp in his boots with his hands clasped, as if he had known exactly who would come and in what order, and had sat down to wait for both of them.