At midday the guards in the lane went to eat.
They did it in turns, Mara saw, one at a time, so that the gate was never unwatched; but the one who stayed sat down on a crate in the lane with his rifle across his knees and his back to the yard wall, and from there he could see the gate and nothing behind it. Tavin watched him sit. Then he took the long slag hook down from its pegs on the melt pit shed and handed Mara a shovel and walked to the back of the yard without a word.
The slag pit was not a pit anymore. It had been, twenty years ago, when Tavin first leased the yard: a hollow behind the melt shed where the furnace’s waste was dumped to cool. But twenty years of waste had filled the hollow and kept going, and now it was a long low mound of grey-black slag, waist high, crusted and glassy on top, running along the back fence almost to the corner. Nothing grew on it. In summer it shimmered with heat. In winter it was the coldest place in the yard.
Tavin walked along the mound to a place near the far end, where an old iron fence post stuck up out of the slag at an angle, rusted almost through. He stood beside it. He counted three paces toward the fence, and stopped, and drove the hook down into the slag at his feet.
“Here,” he said.
They dug.
The slag did not dig like earth. It broke. The hook went into it and levered, and a plate of slag came up, grey and flat and brittle, the size of a roof tile, and when Mara struck it with the edge of the shovel to break it smaller it rang: a short dull glassy note, like a cracked bell. Every plate rang when it was struck. The graft gave her the notes, one after another, dull and dead, the sound of metal that had been melted out of everything useful and left with nothing.
They worked for most of an hour. Neither of them spoke. The only sounds were the hook’s iron bite, the ring of each broken plate, and their breathing, which smoked in the cold air above the hole. Tavin levered and she broke and shoveled, and the pile of broken slag grew beside the hole, and the hole went down. Arlo came out once from the bunk room and looked at them, and Tavin said “Go back in,” and Arlo went. Pell watched from the kitchen doorway with his notebook pressed against his chest and came no closer.
At a little under a meter, the hook struck something that did not ring.
Tavin stopped. He knelt on the edge of the hole, slowly, his bad leg stiff out to the side, and reached down and scraped at the slag with his hands. Under the grey crust there was a darker grey. A flat surface. A corner, sharp and square, bound in steel.
Mara knelt beside him and dug with her fingers.
It came up whole. They cleared the slag from around it, plate by plate, and then Tavin got the hook under one end and levered while Mara pulled, and the trunk came up out of the hole all at once with a long grinding scrape, and slag ran off its corners in black streams.
Tavin lifted it. He would not let her help. He carried it in both arms, against his chest, the way a man carries something heavy and precious, across the yard to the bench, and set it down on the wood under the work lamp, and stepped back.
It was a travel trunk. Steel-cornered, its sides of some dark hard board, its lid curved a little, two steel clasps on the front and a leather handle on top. It was not large. About sixty centimeters long, Mara thought, forty wide, perhaps thirty-five high. A trunk one person could carry, at a stretch, up a gangway onto a transport. It was scratched and scuffed and filthy with slag, and there was a luggage tag still tied to the handle with a twist of wire, a small card gone soft and grey.
She had last seen it in the hall of the flat over the pump house, the night before the fire.
Tavin unfastened the clasps. They were stiff; he worked them with his thumbs. He lifted the lid.
The inside of the trunk was lined with grey felt, and it was dry. Three years under slag, and it was dry. Fitted into it, shaped to the trunk’s curve as though it had been made for it, lay a harness: straps of dark leather and fine bright wire woven together into a long shape, about forty centimeters, with buckles at either end and a flat pocket along its length. It looked like something a climber might wear across the chest, or a smith across the shoulders, to carry tools close to the body.
Beside the harness lay three notebooks.
Grey cloth-bound, each about the size of Mara’s two hands laid side by side. Their spines were numbered in ink, in a neat slanted hand: I, II, III. Mara looked at the numerals and her fingers tightened on the cover, because she knew the hand. She knew the lean of the strokes, the little hook at the bottom of each I. Boot labels. The envelope in the range.
Under the notebooks, wrapped in a square of oiled cloth, was a hammer.
Mara reached past Tavin and lifted it out. The oiled cloth was still supple; someone had oiled it well before burying it. She unwrapped it.
It was a plain steel hand hammer with an ash handle, the handle smooth and dark from years of a palm. It weighed about as much as a good bag of bolts, a little over a kilogram; she knew the heft of hammers, and this was a working weight, neither light nor heavy. The head was small and square-faced, the face perhaps three and a half centimeters by two and a half, and it was dull, though not rusted: a soft grey, almost matte, as if it had been rubbed with ash. She turned it in the lamp light and saw nothing on it at all. No mark. No stamp. Nothing.
She held it a while, puzzled. Then, without quite deciding to, she reached under the cold tray where she had hidden the strip and drew it out and laid it on the bench. And she held the hammer near it, the head a hand’s width above the black metal.
Pale lines appeared.
They came up out of the dull grey of the hammer’s head like frost forming on a window, thin and silvery, a fine pattern of branching lines. And at the same moment, on the strip below, the same lines appeared across its black surface, silver on black, so that the hammer and the strip lay one above the other carrying matching marks, as if each were half of a map and they had found the other half.
The graft rang. A single clear note, high and pure, the note of two things recognizing each other.
“Put it down,” Tavin said.
“It’s reading the strip.”
“Put it down, Mara.”
She did not put it down. She moved the hammer slowly along above the strip, from one end toward the other, and the lines moved with it, rearranging themselves, the branches lengthening and shortening, always matching, always paired. Near the end where the mark was they thickened. Near the cut end, where she had taken Tavin’s sample, they thinned and frayed, as if something were missing.
“She came back from her last expedition with scars,” Tavin said. He was looking not at the hammer but at the trunk. His voice was low. “Radiation scars, up her forearms. You remember them.”
“Yes.”
“And a fear she wouldn’t name. She wouldn’t tell me what. She said she’d have to go out again soon. She said if anything happened to her, I was to take the trunk out of the flat and keep it from the Compact.” He stopped. “Then the fire came. I went up to the flat the next morning, before the Compact men came round, and carried it down out of the hall myself. And I never found proof she’d reached the transport. They said she was on it. I never saw her name on anything.”
He put one hand on the trunk’s open lid.
“Three years I kept it under slag,” he said. “Three years.”
Mara lifted the hammer away from the strip.
The pale lines faded. They went out from the edges inward, slowly, like frost burning off in sun, on the hammer and on the strip together, until the hammer’s head was dull grey again and the strip was plain black and there was nothing to show that anything had passed between them.
She set the hammer down on the oiled cloth.
Tavin reached into the trunk and took out the notebook marked I and laid it on the bench in front of her, and stood back.
“Open the first notebook,” he said.