She unbuttoned her coat and took it out from under her shirt and laid it on the bench in the lamp light.
It looked like nothing much. A strip of black metal, a little longer than her hand, flat, straight, dull. It might have been a piece of trim off a crop-dome frame, or the lining from a cheap valve. It lay on the scarred wood beside Tavin’s tea mug and caught no light at all. The light seemed to go into it and not come out.
Tavin took it in both hands.
He held it the way he had held the Founder plate: carefully, by the edges, as if it might break or as if he might. He turned it toward the lamp. He tilted it, slowly, end to end, studying the surface, and Mara saw him stop.
Near one end, stamped into the black metal so finely that it showed only when the light came across it at a low angle, there was a mark. A small circle. Inside the circle, a hammer. And beside the circle, smaller still, a row of tiny figures.
Mara had looked for that mark on every plate in the yard for three years. She had run her thumb over a thousand corners. She had never found it, and now it lay in Tavin’s hands, under the work lamp, a hammer in a circle.
Her mother’s mark.
Tavin read the figures beside it. Mara saw his lips move. She leaned in and read them too, upside down, and did the arithmetic before she wanted to.
A date in this year’s reckoning. Three years after the transport fire.
Tavin sat down.
He did not sit the way he usually sat, carefully, lowering himself with a hand on the bench to spare the knee. He sat down all at once on the stool behind him, heavily, as though something had struck him behind the knee, a tool swung wrong, a bar slipped off a vise. The stool scraped on the cobbles. The strip stayed in his hands. He sat holding it in his lap with his face gone grey under the lamp, and he said nothing.
“It’s dated this year,” Mara said. Her voice sounded high and thin. “Tavin. It’s dated this year.”
He gave no answer.
“Where did the trunk go?”
He looked up at her. His eyes were very tired.
“She asked me to keep it,” he said. “Your mother. She asked me to keep it from the Compact. If anything happened. So I kept it.”
“Where?”
“I’ll tell you.” He looked down at the strip in his lap. “When you give me a sample. A piece of this, and not before.”
“Why?”
“Because I want something in my hand that I can test,” Tavin said. “Not something I’ve heard about, or something you’ve heard in your head. Something I can put on my own bench and break with my own tools.” His voice was rough. “Cut me a piece. Then we’ll talk about the trunk.”
She took the fine saw from the rack.
It was the finest blade in the yard, a jeweler’s saw with a frame as light as a bird’s bone and a blade like a hair, kept for cutting crystal. She clamped the strip in the bench vise with a scrap of leather on either side to protect it, and set the blade a finger’s width from the end, the end opposite the mark. She wanted the cut well away from the mark.
She began to saw.
The metal was hard. Harder than anything she had cut in the yard, harder than Founder alloy, and the saw went into it slowly, a few hairs’ width with each stroke. She kept the strokes light and even. And on the third stroke, through the vise, through the bench, through her hands and up her arms and into the graft, came a tone: thin and pale, high, steady, like the ringing she had heard through Halvek’s door but softer, sadder. It went on as long as the blade was moving. It stopped when she paused, and began again when she sawed.
She kept on and cut through. The small end piece dropped into her palm, a little square of black metal no bigger than her thumbnail, and the tone stopped all at once.
She held it out to Tavin.
He took it. He looked at it lying in his palm, the cut face pale grey and faintly glittering, the rest black. Then he closed his fingers over it, slowly, and held his fist against his chest.
“You let me think she was dead,” Mara said. “And you kept her trunk.”
It came out without her meaning it to. All of it, three years of it, in one sentence.
“I let you be ordinary,” Tavin said.
“I didn’t want to be ordinary.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“You decided for me.” She was holding the saw so hard that the frame creaked. She made herself set it down. “Everybody decided for me. The city decided I’d be an apprentice. You decided what I’d be told. The Directorate decides what the fire was and what the crash was and what Hearth is. Everybody has the facts except me. And now a man in a grey suit stands in our yard and lies to me, and I don’t know enough to lie back properly.” She heard her voice crack and let it. “Being protected from facts left me defenseless against the people who have them.”
Tavin was silent for a long time. The lamp hissed. In the lane beyond the gate one of the guards coughed and shifted his feet.
“A fact can be a summons,” Tavin said at last. He said it low, to the closed fist against his chest. “You learn a thing, and the thing learns you back. It knows where you are, then. It can call you.” He opened his fist and looked at the small black square in his palm. “Your mother paid for learning too many.”
Mara waited.
He picked the strip up off the bench with his other hand and turned it again to the lamp and read the date a second time, as if it might have changed.
“This year,” he said. “Then either her work outlived her.” He set it down. “Or someone wants us to think so.”
“Which?”
“I don’t know.” He looked at Mara, and for the first time that night his face was not closed. It was frightened. “That’s the truth, Mara. I don’t know which.”
He wrapped the small sample in a clean square of cloth from the rag bin, folded the cloth over it twice, and put it in his shirt pocket and buttoned the pocket.
“Put the strip under the cold tray,” he said. “Under it, not in it. Where the guards won’t see it from the gate.”
She did. The cold tray stood by the quench tank on iron legs, and there was a gap beneath it, between the tray’s bottom and the cobbles, dark and greasy, where nobody ever looked. She slid the strip into the gap and felt it go cool against her fingertips as she let it go.
When she came back, Tavin had stood up. The sky over the towers was paler now; the first grey had become a thin clean blue, and the stars were going out.
“First light,” he said. “We’ll test the sample. Together. Here at the bench. I want to see what it does under a file and a flame before I believe anything about it.”
“And the trunk?”
He looked past her, toward the back of the yard, beyond the melt pit, toward the long low mound of cold slag where the furnace had dumped its waste for twenty years.
“It’s in the slag pit,” he said. “I’ll dig it out at midday, when the guards are eating.” He turned back to her. “You’ll help me. And you’ll stop asking me to explain.”
She opened her mouth.
“You’ll stop,” he said, “because you’ll have the trunk, and you can read for yourself.”
He went into the kitchen. She heard him filling the kettle at the tap, the rattle of the range door, the scrape of the shovel in the coal bin. Everyday sounds. The yard going on.
She stood alone by the bench in the cold dawn. Under the cold tray, the strip lay in the dark. In Tavin’s shirt pocket, wrapped in a rag, the sample lay against his chest. Out in the lane, two guards waited for the yard to give up what it had. And at the back of the yard, under three years of cold slag, her mother’s trunk had been lying all this time, while Mara slept above the office and sorted plates and ran her thumb over every maker’s mark she could find.
What the next fact would ask of them, she could not say. She knew only that Tavin had been right about one thing: now that she had learned it, it knew where she was.