The rod pool had been sitting under seal in the engineering hall’s vault since the third rib was cut, and now it came down the stair on tray one.
Five rods.
Mara counted them on the cutting bench as Tavin unpacked them from their felt cases. Five slender white rods, each the length of her forearm, each with an auditor’s mark at its butt. Nine had gone into the pool, days ago, in the engineering hall: Caldris’s own and eight compliant auditors’. Four had been cut into the third rib’s strip. Five had been held.
Caldris’s was one of the five. Mara knew it by its mark: the Compact’s seal, and under it a small engraved line, the inspector’s number Caldris had held for twenty years.
Tavin laid all five on the block. Side by side. Butts together.
“All five,” he said. “For the cutting.”
Inside each rod was a core. A thread of fine metal running down its length, the part that read seals, that made the rod what it was. Cut the rod open along its length and the core came out whole: a strip, thin and flexible and very pure. The kind of strip a governor needed, at the heart of its valve, to sense the flow and answer it.
