The crate was one of the yard’s long tool crates, pine, with rope handles at either end and a hinged lid, the kind Tavin used to carry kit to jobs across the district. Mara pulled it off the stack by the office and set it on the bench and opened it, and stood looking into it for a while, empty, smelling of sawdust and old oil.
She had no idea how to pack for a lamp.
She knew how to pack for a job. A job in the Low Brace meant the bag: files, a hammer, a couple of wrenches, the torch if there was welding, pins and bolts in a tin. A job across the river meant the bag and the small crate. She had never packed for a job she could not see the end of, on a world she had never stood on, at a gate whose meaning she could not guess, under a sun that was failing.
So she packed what she would need if everything went wrong, which was the only way she could think to do it.
Spares first. That was the rule. Tavin’s rule, and before that, she suspected, the rule of whoever had taught Tavin. Spare pins, in their tin. Spare bolts, two sizes. A spare file, the coarse one. A coil of the yard’s best wire. A roll of seal gasket for the Tern’s bay, from the stack Tavin had put out. She packed them along the bottom, wedged tight so they would not shift.
Then the spare blanket. The yard had a second fire blanket, older and thinner than the one she had lost on the field, kept folded in a chest in the melt pit shed for the day the first one wore out. She had never seen it unfolded. She took it out now, shook it, folded it again, and laid it in the crate on top of the spares. It smelled of the shed: soot and damp.
Then the rolled tongs, the long-handled pair wrapped in leather, for lifting anything too hot to hold.
Tavin was at the parts rack, finishing the crate for the Tern. He had been silent since the flight plan came up on the console. He was angry. She could tell by the way he set things down. Tavin never slammed anything; he set each thing down a fraction harder than it needed, so that each one made a small sharp sound on the shelf or in the crate. He was angry, and he was helping her, and he was doing both at once, steadily, without comment.
He came over to the bench with a wrench in his hand. A good wrench, his own, the adjustable one with the brass knurl that he had carried since before she was born. He pushed it into the crate, into the gap beside the tongs, without a word.
“That’s yours,” she said.
“Pack the spares first,” he said. “Pride after.”
Which of them he meant by pride, she could not tell. She did not ask.
She weighed the wrench in her hand before she let it lie. She knew its heft without looking; she had borrowed it a hundred times and been told a hundred times to put it back on its own hook and not the one beside it. He had never once lent it out of the yard. Arlo had asked for it for a job across the river, two winters ago, and been handed the yard’s spare instead without a word of explanation. Now it lay in her crate between the tongs and the gasket roll, its brass knurl catching the lamp, and she understood that it was going wherever she was going, and that he had decided this without asking her either.
When the tools were in, she stood back and looked at the crate. It was full. It was heavy. It would go into the Tern’s hold and come out again somewhere she had never been, and she could not say whether she would be the one to carry it back.
There was a marker in the chalk tray, a thick black grease pencil for writing on metal. She picked it up.
The crate’s lid was plain pine, scarred, with old marks on it from other jobs half sanded off: a district number, a date, someone’s initials. She turned the lid up and found a clean place near the top.
She wrote the name. In large square letters, her measuring hand, the way she would write a part number.
EDRIN.
She looked at it.
Then she said it aloud. Once. Low, so that only she heard it, or almost only. She said it the way she had said her mother’s name in the dark for three years, in her room above the office, at night, when she could not sleep and could not face thinking and the name came out anyway, under her breath, to the ceiling. A name said not to call anyone. A name said so that it had been said.
“Edrin.”
Pell came in through the kitchen door.
He had been at the table all morning, doing his household lists; he had ink on his fingers and his notebook under his arm. He stopped at the end of the bench and looked at the crate, and at Mara holding the marker, and at the name on the lid.
“Who’s that?” he said.
“The courier.”
“The one on the field.” He had seen the fire from the roof, the ring of blue light; he had counted the sirens, as she had told him to. He had not seen the man in the seat. He looked at the name. “What was his name?”
She had written it right there in front of him in letters as tall as her thumb. She understood that he was not asking what it said. He was asking her to tell him.
“Edrin,” she said.
Pell nodded slowly. He opened his notebook and turned past his household lists, past the numbered list from the tithe gate with count not checked still written beside the blank total, to a clean place at the bottom of the page. He wrote the name there, carefully, in his own small round hand. Edrin. He looked at it, then closed the book.
“I’ll keep it too,” he said.
Tavin had stopped working. He stood by the rack with a box of clamps in his hands and looked at the crate lid for a long time. Then he looked at Mara.
“Good,” he said. “Keep his name on something.”
He put the clamps in the Tern’s crate and went back into the kitchen, and a moment later Mara heard the range door open and the scrape of the shovel.
She looked at the lid again. Under the name there was room. She took the marker and wrote, smaller, in a line beneath it: Cinder. The conveyor fields. Night. The place, and the time. Where it had happened. She left out the date, because she would not write a date beside him that the Directorate had already written beside engine accident. Just where, and when.
She thought about writing ash gate. She held the marker over the lid. She did not write it. She had no idea what an ash gate was, whether it was a place or a thing or a word for something else entirely, and she would not put a word on his crate that she could not stand behind.
Below that there was still room. A clean line of pine, the width of a name.
She looked at it for some time.
She thought of the man in the seat with his chin on his chest, and the switch, and the unfinished sentence. Mara. Tell your. She thought of the mark on the strip, the hammer in the circle, and the date beside it. She thought of her mother’s trunk in the slag pit at the back of the yard, which they would dig out at midday when the guards went to eat. She thought of the evacuation schedule on the bench, with its two dates six days apart, and Sera’s sister reading a gauge in a cold room under a dying lamp. She thought of all the people whose names might need to go somewhere, on something, so that they were not only a line on a Directorate card.
She did not write anything on the empty line.
She left it. She capped the marker and put it back in the chalk tray, and she closed the lid of the crate, and the name looked up at her from the pine, EDRIN, with the place and the time beneath it and the one empty line below that, waiting.
Out in the lane the guards were talking quietly to each other. The sun was high now. It would be midday soon. She put her hand on the lid for a moment, the way she put her hand on metal before she trusted it, and then she went to find a shovel.