The car’s rear door opened while Mara was still standing in the gateway.
Director Halvek stepped out into the lane. He moved without hurry, as though he had simply arrived somewhere at the hour he had planned to arrive, and he straightened his coat and looked at the yard gate, then at Mara and Sera standing in it, then past them at Tavin under the work lamp. The folder was under his arm. The buff card, the ribbon. In the dark his cuffs were very white.
Two guards got out of the car’s front seats. They wore Directorate grey and carried short rifles slung, and they took up places on either side of the gate without being told, their hands loose, their faces blank.
“Good morning,” Halvek said. “Or nearly. May I come in?”
He went on without waiting for an answer. He walked past Mara and Sera into the yard, and Mara turned and followed him, because there was nothing else to do, and Sera followed her.
Halvek crossed to the bench. He stopped a few paces from it and looked at the things on it under the lamp, with the same weighing glance Mara had felt in his outer office: once, all over, and then at the one place that mattered. There was not much on the bench. Tavin’s tea mug. The chalk tray. A file. And, laid on the wood near the edge, where Sera had dropped it on her way across the yard a minute before, the charred corner of the fire blanket. Black along one side, singed brown across the rest, a few grey threads of the weave still showing.
Halvek looked at it. Then he looked at Mara. At her coat. At the cuff of her right sleeve, where the wool had scorched brown and stiff, a band of it, from the wrist halfway to the elbow, exactly where she had pressed her forearm to the blanket on the seam.
Tavin had seen the blanket too. Mara watched his face. When his eyes found the charred scrap on the bench, his face closed all at once. When she asked about Iona it closed slowly, the shop shutters coming down one at a time. This time a door slammed.
“I am here about the incident on the conveyor fields,” Halvek said. He set the folder down on the bench, carefully, beside the blanket scrap, without touching it. “An unregistered courier vessel came down in the night. An engine accident. You will have heard.”
Nobody said anything.
“The vessel was carrying cargo,” Halvek went on. “We do not yet know what. My crews were unable to recover it. It is possible that something was removed from the wreck before they arrived. Unknown materials can carry dangerous charges. Founder materials in particular. If anyone in the Low Brace came into possession of such a material, they would be at risk. So would their household.” He paused. “The Directorate is offering a reward for anything recovered from the wreck. A substantial reward. The reward is for the material. Not for the pilot.”
He said the last words with no change in his voice at all.
Mara stood with her hands at her sides. Inside her coat, against her ribs, the strip lay cool, and she could feel its faint hum in the graft, steady, patient. She wondered if Halvek could hear it. She thought he could not. She thought he did not need to.
“Miss Venn,” Halvek said. “Were you on the fields last night?”
“I got there after,” Mara said. “After the fire. When the crews were already there.”
It came out badly. She heard it come out badly: too quick, too even, the words lined up like a lesson she had learned on the walk home. She had never been good at lying. She had never had to be. In the yard, a lie about metal was found out the first time the metal took a load.
Halvek looked at her scorched cuff.
He let the silence go on long enough for everyone in the yard to look at it too. Sera. Tavin. The two guards at the gate.
“Let us be precise,” he said. “The cuff is a fact, and it does not agree with you.”
Mara held his eye.
Halvek seemed to need no answer. He turned from her to the back wall, where the chalk debt column ran down the brick beside the office door, Tavin’s square figures month after month, the box around them, the figure at the bottom larger than the one above it. He studied it for some time. He read it, Mara realized, the whole column, the way he had read the sheet on the clerk’s tray while she stood waiting: thoroughly, without hurry, top to bottom.
“Your yard owes the Directorate a good deal for heat, Mr. Rusk,” he said.
Tavin said nothing.
“I could make that column disappear,” Halvek said. He said it mildly, as one might mention that the weather would clear by noon. “The whole of it. Principal, penalty, interest. Written off by the office as an administrative correction. The yard would begin the winter owing nothing.” He turned back to them. “In return, I ask only that everyone in this yard remember the same account of last night. One account. The one the crews have already given. And one memory of it.” He paused. “That seems a small thing to ask, in exchange for a winter’s heat.”
It was kind. That was what made it terrible. He said it kindly, in a soft reasonable voice, and the kindness had a shape to it, and the shape was a room with a lock on the door.
Mara looked at Tavin.
Tavin kept his eyes from the chalk wall and from both of them. He was looking at the folder on the bench, the buff card with its ribbon, and the five words in pencil on its cover that Mara had not been able to read in the energy office and still could not read now, upside down, in the lamp light. His face was closed and grey and very tired.
“The sample,” Halvek said. “Whatever came out of the wreck. I will take it now, and the reward will be paid to the yard’s account by noon.”
“There’s no sample,” Mara said.
It was a worse lie than the first. She knew it as she said it. Halvek knew it. He looked at her with something that was almost sympathy, the way one looks at a child who has hidden a broken cup behind their back and is standing in front of the shelf.
“Then I will wait for it,” he said.
He turned to the gate and lifted one hand, a small gesture, and the two guards straightened.
“Wait here,” he told them. “Outside the gate. Until the yard is ready to give me what it has.”
The guards said nothing. They took up places in the lane, one on either side of the gate, their backs to the yard wall, their rifles slung.
Halvek picked up his folder. He tucked it back under his arm, beneath the white cuff. He looked once more at the blanket scrap on the bench, and once more at Mara’s sleeve, and then at Tavin.
“The Directorate will be reviewing the Low Brace yards by the next tithe,” he said. “Their licenses. Their accounts. Their holdings of unregistered material.” He chose each word carefully; Mara watched him choose them. He did not say engine accident or nothing recoverable, or any of the words the crews had used on the field. “I would like this yard’s review to be a short one.”
He went out through the gate. He got into the back of the black car, and the door closed with a soft heavy sound, and the car started. It did not turn on its lights. It went off down the lane in the dark, slowly, its engine a low purr, and turned the corner at the pump house and was gone.
The guards stayed.
Mara stood in the middle of the yard. Her hands were shaking now, which they had not done on the field, or in the cabin, or under the drone’s light. She put them in her coat pockets to stop them, and her right hand found the strip through the lining, snug against her side.
Sera had not moved from the gateway. She was looking at the guards in the lane with an expression Mara could not read.
Tavin got up off his stool. Slowly, a hand on the bench, taking the weight off the bad knee. He picked up the charred scrap of the blanket and held it in his palm and looked at it for a while. Then he set it down again, gently, on the bench, and turned to Mara.
“Show me,” he said.
The yard was very quiet. Far off, at the edge of the district, the first grey of dawn was coming up behind the cooling towers, and the debt column stood on the wall in its chalk box, and somewhere out in the lane the guards were waiting for the yard to decide which account it would remember, and who would pay for it.