He would not let her read it at the bench, or by daylight with the guards in the lane. He waited until the guards changed at dusk. Then he picked up the notebook and the trunk and carried them into the back room, where Pell slept, and set the trunk on the floor by the broken bellows and the notebook on the crate of old files that served Pell as a table. He hung the single lamp from its hook over the crate and lit it. He sent Pell out to the kitchen. He shut the door.
“Sit,” he said. “Read it aloud.”
“I can read it to myself.”
“Read it aloud,” Tavin said. “So I hear it too. So it’s said in this room and not only in your head.”
She sat on the floor beside the crate with her back against the bellows and the notebook on her knees. He sat on Pell’s bedroll against the opposite wall with his bad leg out, in the shadow, outside the circle of lamp light.
She opened it.
The first page was blank except for one line. It was written in the middle of the page, in that slanted quick hand, the letters leaning forward, a little larger than the rest of the writing in the book would be, as if her mother had wanted it to be the first thing anyone saw.
Mara read it aloud.
“Never work the heart without a witness who can pull you out.”
The room was quiet. The lamp hissed softly. She heard her own voice saying her mother’s words and it sounded like someone else’s.
“Go on,” Tavin said.
She turned the page.
She had expected maps. She had expected secrets, diagrams of lamps, the inside of a star-heart drawn the way the Founder plate drew it, columns of numbers, the answer to the curve on the wall. She had expected the thing that had made a courier sew a strip of black metal into his sleeve and fall burning out of the sky.
The second page was a list of symptoms.
Early signs of exposure, it said at the top, underlined once. Then, in a numbered list: 1. Tremor in the fingers, first the smallest, then the ring. 2. Metallic taste. 3. Hearing a sound twice, or a sound that belongs to another day. 4. Warmth behind the ears or eyes that does not go when you leave the heat. 5. The wish to stay. That one was underlined twice. The wish to stay. When you notice it, you are already late. Leave.
Mara read the list aloud. When she came to the fifth item her voice faltered, and she read it again, more slowly.
Under the list, a paragraph: Judgment goes before strength. You will feel able long after you are not able. This is the danger. Set the limit before you go in and let someone else hold it. Do not set it while you are in the heat. You will set it wrong.
She thought of the test room. Ninety heartbeats. Tavin with the rope. Ninety. Then you stop, whatever it’s singing. She looked across at him in the shadow and he was not looking at her. He was looking at the trunk.
She read on.
Pages of procedure. Steps for some operation she could not follow, written tersely, numbered, with small diagrams in the margins: a hand holding something, an arrow, a curve. Beside the steps, in the same hand, other notes. Ordinary notes. Eat before. Not too much. Bread and salt, no sugar, sugar makes the shake worse. A food list, down the side of one page: barley, salt fish, dried apple, the hard biscuit from the dock stores, NOT the soft. At the bottom of another page, written small and slanting downward as though her hand had been tired: Hands shake after a long shift. Wait for them to stop before writing the log. A shaking hand writes a lie.
Mara stopped reading. She sat with her finger on the line.
It was not what she had wanted. She had wanted revelations. She had wanted her mother to explain herself, to say this is what I was doing and this is why I left and this is where I went. Instead there were maintenance habits. Food lists. A note about waiting for your hands to stop shaking before you wrote anything down.
And somehow it was worse, and better, than any revelation could have been. Because she knew this woman. She did not know the woman who had traveled between the lamps and come home with radiation scars; she had never met her. But she knew the woman who wrote NOT the soft in capitals about a ship’s biscuit. She knew the woman who waited for her hands to stop shaking. That woman had stood at the kitchen counter in the flat over the pump house with her palms flat on the wood and her eyes closed, waiting, while Mara and Pell ate their supper and pretended not to notice. Mara had seen her do it a hundred times and never known what she was waiting for.
Her mother felt closer in that moment than she had in three years.
“Go on,” Tavin said, hardly louder than the lamp.
She went on. In the margin of one page, beside a list of steps, there was a small mark: a plus sign, a cross with equal arms, drawn neatly in ink. Then another, three lines down. Then a third. What they meant, she could not tell. She turned to the inside of the front cover and found, written there in small letters in the corner, a key: + = relief flow. Nothing else.
“What does this mean?” She held the notebook up toward the lamp so he could see the plus sign. “Relief flow.”
Tavin stayed where he was. “Read what the page says,” he said. “Not what I think it says.”
“The page doesn’t say anything. It just says relief flow.”
“Then that’s what it says.”
She looked at him. He looked back, steadily, from the shadow, and she understood that he would not explain, and also that he did not know, or not enough to say.
She turned back to the trunk. The luggage tag was still tied to the handle, a small card on a twist of wire. She leaned over and lifted it toward the lamp. The ink on it had faded to a pale brown, and the card was soft and furred at the edges, but the words were still legible, in a clerk’s printed hand, not her mother’s.
Halden Wake.
She read it aloud.
“That’s a station,” Tavin said. “Out past Cinder’s moon. I’ve seen the name on an old Compact survey board, at the dock office, years ago. A long list of stations. It was one of them.” He paused. “I’ve never been there.”
“Did she go there?”
“She went out,” Tavin said. “That’s all I know. She went out, and she came back, and she went out again. I don’t know where. I’ve said it three times now.”
“You haven’t said it three times. You’ve said it once.”
“I’ve said it three times in my head,” Tavin said, “every time you’ve asked me something else.”
She almost laughed. It caught in her chest and turned into something else. She looked down at the notebook and turned the page and kept reading, aloud, a paragraph about the order in which to lay out tools before a long session, so that a shaking hand could find them without looking. Her voice was steady for most of it.
Then the pain started.
It began behind her left ear, low, a warmth at first, then a pressure. She kept reading. The pressure grew. It was the graft. It had begun to hum, very faintly, and she realized that it was humming on the ink. On the page. Her mother’s ink, laid down years ago with a pen in that slanted hand, and something in it, some trace of whatever her mother’s hands had been touching when she wrote, was speaking to the graft, the way the strip spoke to it, the way the hammer had.
She read another line. The pressure became a line of pain, the same line as in the shed, from behind her ear forward along the side of her skull.
She stopped in the middle of a sentence. The word she was saying broke off unfinished.
Tavin was already moving. He came across the small room in two steps, on his bad leg, and crouched beside her, and took the notebook gently out of her hands. He closed it. He set it on the crate, beside the lamp, face down.
“That’s enough for tonight,” he said.
She sat against the bellows with her hand pressed to the side of her head, breathing.
“I’ll read you the next page tomorrow,” Tavin said. “In the morning. When you’ve slept.”
“I’ll read it tonight.”
He looked at her. She reached past him and picked up the notebook from the crate and put it on her knees again, closed, with both hands on the cover.
He did not take it back. After a while he stood, slowly, and went to the door, and opened it, and stood in the doorway with the kitchen’s light behind him.
She sat in the circle of lamp light with her mother’s notebook on her knees and the luggage tag on the trunk beside her, Halden Wake in faded brown ink, and she kept the notebook. She kept her thumb on the edge of the next page, which might say where the tag pointed, and held off turning it.