They tested the sample at first light, as Tavin had said, and it told them almost nothing.
Under the file it was harder than anything in the yard; the file skated off it and left a bright scratch on the file’s own teeth. In the flame of the brazing torch it never changed color at all. Tavin held it there for a full minute, longer than any metal he knew could stand without at least going straw-yellow, and it stayed black and grey, and when he took it out of the flame and dropped it into the quench tank it went in without a hiss. It went into the water like a stone into a pond, silent, and lay on the bottom.
Tavin fished it out with tongs and turned it in his fingers. It was cool.
“Well,” he said.
That was all he said. He wrapped it in the rag again and put it back in his pocket.
Sera came in through the gate at midmorning. The two guards in the lane looked at her and let her by; they had been told, Mara supposed, to watch for things going out, not for people coming in. Sera walked straight across the yard to the bench with a sheet of paper in her hand and threw it down on the wood in front of Mara.
“Inspection notice,” she said.
Mara picked it up. It was a printed Directorate form with the Tern’s registry number typed in, and a stamp: FLAGGED FOR INSPECTION. Below the stamp, a date for the inspection queue. Two days from now.
“A flag is a fee with a clock on it,” Sera said. “They inspect the ship. They find something. They always find something. They charge me for finding it. And while they’re finding it, the ship sits in the queue and doesn’t fly.” She pulled off her gloves. “Two days in the queue, if I’m lucky. A week if I’m not. They flagged it an hour after your director left.”
“He’s not my director.”
“He’s somebody’s.” Sera sat down on the upturned bin across the bench. Her face was very tired and very hard. “That’s not the worst of it.”
She took a second paper out of her jacket. This one was folded small and creased many times. She unfolded it and smoothed it flat on the bench, and Mara saw the Compact’s seal at the top: a circle of nine small stars around a lamp.
“The Compact posts its evacuation schedules on the public board at the dock office,” Sera said. “Every morning. I copy the one for Lorn’s Reach, at whatever port I’m in, every morning, for a year.” She put her finger on a line near the bottom. “This morning they changed it.”
Mara read the line. Lorn’s Reach — final evacuation deadline — and a date, and beside the date, in smaller type, (revised; previously and another date, ).
She counted the days between the two dates. Six.
“They moved it forward six days,” Sera said. “No reason given. They don’t have to give a reason. The lamp’s failing faster than they said, or they’ve decided to close it sooner, or someone needs the transports somewhere else. It doesn’t matter which.” She sat back. “My sister won’t wait six days for me. She can’t. The last transport goes on that date and anyone who’s not on the list stays.”
She did not say her sister’s name. She did not say my sister will die. She said it the way she had said everything else that mattered, short and plain, and then she put her gloves back on, slowly, one finger at a time.
Mara looked at the line on the schedule. Then at the inspection notice. Then at Sera’s hands.
“The chip,” she said.
Sera looked up.
“The navigation chip. You gave it to me for the claw. It has routes on it that aren’t on the public charts. Your own routes.” Mara took the chip out of her apron pocket and set it on the bench between them. “The courier said the ash gate at Lorn. Lorn. You said there are lanes nobody flies. If we put his coordinates on this chip, the Tern could get there without the Directorate lanes. Without the queue. And I’ll fix the rest of your engine. Everything that’s wrong with it. That’s the trade.”
“No,” Sera said.
She said it at once, without thinking, without even looking at the chip. A door closing.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t fly people into lanes nobody flies on the word of a dead courier.” Sera’s voice was hard. “Because I don’t know you. Because whatever that man gave you on the field is the reason there are two guards in your lane and my ship is flagged. Because I have one job, which is my sister, and I can’t do it if I’m chasing your mother’s ghost through the dark.” She stopped. “No.”
Mara turned to Tavin. He was at the far end of the bench with the rag-wrapped sample in his pocket, saying nothing.
She held out her hand to him.
He looked at her hand for a moment. Then he unbuttoned his shirt pocket and took out the rag and unfolded it and laid the small black square in her palm.
She turned it so the stamped figures on its outer face faced Sera. Mara had cut it from the far end; the mark was not on it. But the date was, repeated along the piece’s outer face in tiny stamped numerals, as if whoever had made the strip had wanted the date to survive even if the mark was lost.
“Read it,” Mara said.
Sera took the sample. She held it to the light and read the date. She read it again. Mara watched her do the arithmetic, the same arithmetic Mara had done in the dark under the work lamp.
“That’s her mark,” Mara said. “On the other end. My mother’s. And that’s this year.”
Sera handed back the sample. Her face had not changed.
“I don’t believe she’s alive,” she said.
“Neither do I.”
“Good.” Sera looked at the evacuation schedule, at the line with its two dates. “I’ll go and find out.”
Mara closed her hand over the sample. “Then we go tonight.”
“Then you fix my engine by tonight.”
“I can’t fix it all by tonight.” Mara made herself think it through, the way she would think through a job for a customer, in order. “The fuel line cover’s cracked. I saw it when I did the claw. The bay seal on the cargo hatch is perished. And there’s a crack in the main intake, a hairline, near the flange. I heard it when you came down.” She counted them on her fingers. “Fuel line cover. Bay seal. Intake. That’s two days in the bay, done properly. Not one.”
“Then we leave at night,” Sera said, “and you can finish in the air.”
Mara stared at her.
“I’ve had worse done in the air,” Sera said. “The intake will hold for a run if you patch it. You can do the seal on the way. The fuel line cover you do before we lift, because if that goes, we burn.”
From the back of the yard, where he had gone while they talked, Tavin’s voice came, not loud: “The fuel line needs a cover before the Tern flies anywhere.”
Sera nodded without looking up. “That’s what I said.”
Mara turned. Tavin was by the parts rack, with a crate at his feet, and he was taking things off the shelves and putting them into it: a coil of fuel line, a roll of seal gasket, a tin of intake putty, a box of clamps, two spare pins. He kept his eyes on the shelves. He worked steadily, without hurry, reading the labels on the bins, and the crate was already half full.
He had begun before Sera had said yes. Before Mara had asked. He had begun, she understood, at some point while they were talking, when he had heard the word tonight and known.
She looked at the crate, at his broad back bent over it, and something moved in her throat that she had no name for.
She took the chip to the small console on the office wall, the yard’s only one, a battered Directorate terminal used for parts orders and tithe receipts. It had a Compact port. She slotted the chip in, and the screen came up grey and flickering, and she typed in the coordinates Edrin had said, which were only one word, Lorn, and then she stopped, because one word was not a route.
Sera came and stood behind her. She looked at the screen, then reached past Mara’s shoulder and typed a line of figures, quickly, without hesitating, her lips moving a little as she went.
“His console was showing his last plot,” she said, “before he burned it. I read it while I was checking his straps.” She hit the last key. “Rescue pilots read the screen first. Always. In case it’s the last thing anyone can read.”
The flight plan built itself on the screen, a thin pale line across a grey chart. It ran out from Cinder along the Directorate’s main lane for a while, a broad marked channel, and then, a day out, it turned off. It left the marked lane and ran on alone across the grey, a single faint line through empty chart, toward a point labeled only with a number.
“There,” Sera said, and put her finger on the screen where the line left the lane. “That’s the old cargo ring. Nobody’s flown that lane in years, not since the Compact closed it.”
“Why did they close it?”
“They didn’t say.”
Mara looked at the faint line running out alone into the grey, toward a point with no name. She traced it with one finger to where it stopped at the chart’s edge, and held her finger there.