The guards in the lane changed at the eleventh bell. Mara watched it from the kitchen window: a new pair coming down from the pump-house corner with their rifles slung, the old pair walking off toward the river bridge, a short exchange at the gate, a laugh. Then the new pair settled in, one on the crate and one standing, and the one on the crate lit a pipe.
Sera came to the back door at the half bell. There was no knock. She opened the door a hand’s width and said, through it, “The Tern’s loaded. The night sweep goes over at the twelfth. We lift at a quarter past, behind it, while their scan is still pointed the wrong way. Be on the ramp by the twelfth.” She closed the door.
Mara put on her coat.
She put on the harness first, under it, the way her mother must have worn it: the straps over her shoulders and across her back, the flat pocket down her front, the notebooks lying against her chest and the hammer in its side pocket against her ribs. It was heavier than she expected. Not much heavier than the leather apron she wore at the bins, but the weight sat differently, closer, higher, pressed against her breastbone so that she could feel her own heart beating against the notebooks.
She buttoned the coat over it. She picked up her bag. In the bag, on top, folded, were the good socks.
Pell was awake. He had woken when Sera opened the door, and now he sat at the table with the blanket still around his shoulders and his eyes very wide, watching her. His pencil was in his fist, and the knuckles of that hand had gone white. He had his notebook open in front of him at a page she could not see.
Tavin was at the back door.
He had his coat on too, and his cap, and a lamp in one hand, and in the other a flask. A tin flask with a screw cap, the kind the dock workers carried, wrapped in a cloth. He held it out to her.
“Broth,” he said. “Hot. For the first night.”
She took it. It was warm through the cloth, and heavy. She unscrewed the cap, because the smell came up at her and she was suddenly, ridiculously hungry, and took a mouthful.
It was so salty her eyes watered.
She coughed. She held it in her mouth a moment and then swallowed it, and it went down hot and salt and thick, and her eyes stung and her nose ran and she stood in the back doorway of the kitchen holding the flask and blinking.
“I put too much salt in it,” Tavin said. “Eat it anyway.”
She laughed.
It came out of her once, sudden and loud, a single bark of laughter, and it hurt. It hurt her head: the line behind her left ear, the one the notebook’s ink had drawn that evening, flared, and she put her hand to it, and the laugh stopped. She stood with her hand on her head and the flask in her other hand and her eyes still watering from the salt.
Tavin did not smile. He never smiled. But he made no move to take the flask back either. He stood in the doorway and watched her screw the cap on and put the flask in her bag beside the good socks.
Pell got up from the table. He came to the door with his notebook and tore out a card, not a page: one of the household cards he used for his lists, a stiff square of grey card with the yard’s stamp on the back. He had written on it in pencil. He held it out.
She took it and read it in the light from Tavin’s lamp.
1. A stone from wherever you land. 2. A bolt you did not have to pay for. 3. A date. The real one. Not the Directorate one.
“Write from wherever you land,” Pell said.
“I will.”
“Every stop.”
“Every stop.”
He looked at her, and she could see him deciding whether to say the next thing. He said it.
“And say whether Sera is rude to you.”
“She’s rude to everyone.”
“Then say how rude,” Pell said. “On a scale. One to ten. I want numbers.”
Mara put the card in her coat pocket, the outside one, where she could reach it.
“I’ll send numbers,” she said.
She read the card again before she put it away. Not the Directorate one. He had underlined real twice. She thought of the notice that would be on the district gate in the morning, engine accident, no survivors, nothing recoverable, with a date beside it, and of Pell standing in front of it with his notebook, copying the date and writing not checked beside it in his small round hand. He would do it. She knew he would. He would stand in front of the Directorate’s own notice and refuse to believe its date until he had a second source, and nobody in the Low Brace would understand why the Venn boy was copying a notice about a crash he had only seen from a roof.
They went out into the yard, the three of them. Tavin carried the lamp. The night was cold and clear and very dark, the stars thick overhead, Hearth long gone below the towers. Across the yard, beyond the fence, the Tern sat in its bay with its cargo hatch closed now and its running lights off, a long dark shape against the sky.
At the gate, Tavin stopped.
He turned to her, and he held out his hand.
It was not to take her bag, or to give her anything. He held it out the way he held it out to apprentices on the day they passed: the formal handshake, palm sideways, thumb up. She had seen him do it twice, to two journeymen from other yards who had come to finish their papers under him, years ago. He had never done it to her. She had never passed.
She shifted the bag to her other hand and took his hand.
His grip was hard and dry and very warm. He shook her hand once, up and down, the way it was done.
“Come back to the bench,” he said.
“I’ll come back to the bench.”
He let go.
She turned to the gate. It was the back gate, the small one in the fence that led to the Tern’s bay, not the main gate where the guards were. Tavin had chosen it for that reason. She put her hand on the bolt and pulled.
It stuck.
She pulled again. It held fast. Rust, or cold, or the gate had sagged on its hinge. She pushed at it and the bolt only scraped in its keeper.
Tavin set the lamp down on the cobbles. He took a small oil can from his coat pocket. He always had it; she had never seen him without it. He knelt, slowly, his bad leg stiff out to the side, and put a few drops of oil on the bolt, and on the hinge pins, and worked the bolt back and forth with his thick fingers, slowly, patiently, a quarter turn and back, a quarter turn and back, the way he did every evening before a long night, the way he had done it to the main gate every night for twenty years.
He kept his eyes down while he did it.
She stood above him with her bag in her hand and the harness against her chest and the salt still on her tongue, and watched his hands on the bolt.
The bolt slid free.
He stayed kneeling a moment longer, his hand still on the bolt, his head down. Then he put the oil can back in his pocket and picked up the lamp and stood up, slowly, and stepped back from the gate.
Across the bay, the Tern’s running lights came on. Two quick blinks, green and red, and then off. Then two more. Impatient.
“That’s Sera,” Pell said.
“I know.”
The lights blinked again.
Mara looked at Tavin. He was standing with the lamp at his side, its light on the cobbles, his face in the shadow above it. She looked at Pell, with the blanket still around his shoulders and his notebook pressed to his chest.
She shifted the harness on her shoulders, settling the weight. Then she opened the gate and went through it, out onto the dark ground of the bay, toward the Tern’s blinking lights, and behind her she heard the gate close, gently, and the bolt slide home in its new oil without a sound.
She did not look back. She thought that if she looked back she would not go. She walked on across the frozen ground with her eyes on the Tern’s blinking lights, and kept them there until the hatch was close enough to touch.