Ysol’s voice came through the Sable relay at the eighteenth hour, flat and tired.
Mara was back in the lowest chamber. The tea tin sat where Breda had taped it, on the service bus beside the oiled tools, its cracked corner under cloth tape. Ysol’s voice came out of its small speaker as if she had been arguing for some time with a cup of tea that would not improve and had given up on it.
“I heard your terms,” she said. “On the public band. The archive keeps the record and gives up the last word. Good. You’ll need something else, though, and I’m going to say it before anyone else does, because I said it four hundred years ago and nobody wrote it down.”
Sera was there. She had come down the cold stair an hour before, from the lower dock, with the Tern’s fuel figures and nothing to do with them until the third rib seated. She sat on the crate by the bench with her arms folded and the rescue line still round her wrist. Her flight boots were grey with the dock’s grit, and she had not taken off her gloves.
“Say it,” Mara said.
