The tithe was finished by midafternoon, and the Low Brace went quiet in the way it always did after a tithe, as if the whole district had been told something it would rather not repeat.
Mara walked back from the market steps with a sack of yard bolts over her shoulder. Tavin had sent her to the ironmonger for them, and she had gone the long way, down Gutter Lane and across the old conveyor bridge, because she wanted to see. She was not sure exactly what she wanted to see. How the week had gone, perhaps. The places where the quota had landed.
It had landed everywhere.
In Gutter Lane the kitchen windows were open, which was wrong for the month. She looked in as she passed and saw stoves with their lids pulled off and leaned against the wall, the iron rings stacked beside them. That was what people did when they could not afford to heat a stove and could not bear to look at it cold. A stove with its lid on was a promise. A stove with its lid off was a decision. One kitchen had a crate of potatoes on the cold stove top, using it as a shelf. Another had a child asleep in a chair in a coat.
Shutters were down along the lane, though it was the middle of the day. Shops had closed to save their own heat. At the corner where Gutter Lane met the bridge stairs, a repair stall sat under its awning with all its tools wrapped in cloth: the files, the hammers, the little brass torch, each in its own grey bundle, laid out in a row on the bench like a family at a funeral.
The stall’s owner sat behind it with his hands in his armpits. He was a man of perhaps sixty, with a soft square face and wire spectacles. Mara had bought washers from him for years. She had never learned his name. He knew hers.
She was halfway past when the light went.
It dimmed; it never went out. Every shadow on the lane thickened at once, the white of the sky over the rooftops turned the color of weak tea, and the warmth that had been sitting lightly on the back of her neck went thin. A dog stopped barking in the middle of a bark. A cart on the bridge above her stopped rolling.
Every street stopped.
Then, after four or five seconds, the light climbed back. The tea color drained out of the sky. The dog finished its bark. The cart rolled on, its wheels grinding on the bridge stones, and the man behind the repair stall shifted his hands from one armpit to the other.
Nobody looked up. That was the part she noticed most. In the four or five seconds of dimness every face on the lane had stayed level, eyes on the cobbles, on the stall, on the next step, as though looking up would make it count.
Mara looked up.
Hearth hung over the cooling towers at the district’s eastern edge, round and steady now, too bright to look at for more than a blink. She had known it all her life. It rose on schedule, most days. It was hot at noon and red at dusk and somewhere inside it, behind layers she had never seen and never would, was the star-heart: a patterned mass of living alloy that took energy from a reservoir no one on Cinder could point to and folded it, the way a smith folds iron, into warmth and light.
She had learned that in the dormitory school, from a primer with a drawing of a lamp cut open like a fruit. The heart sat at the center like a stone. The primer said the Founders had made it and the Founders had made it perfect, and the Directorate kept it so. The primer did not say what a dimming meant.
She thought she knew. A dimming was the heart losing its hold on the path for a moment, the energy slipping its channels and finding them again. It was like a fold that would not stay closed, a pinch in a weld. A small fault, self-correcting. Until the day it was not small.
She listened. Overhead, the power cables that ran from the district substation along the rooftops creaked in their brackets, settling back under load. The sound was all through the lane, a low complaining hum, and under it the graft behind her left ear gave her a faint sour note that she distrusted. No single fault she could find; the whole district was straining at once.
She did not write anything down. There was nothing to write that she could check.
“Venn,” said the man at the stall.
She went over. He reached under his bench and came up with a stove valve, a brass body the size of her fist with its handle snapped off. He set it on the wrapped tools.
“Can you fix this before the next tithe?”
She picked it up. The brass was cold and clean inside, the threads whole, the seat unmarked. She turned the stem with her thumbnail where the handle had broken off, and it moved freely. A handle was a twenty-minute job on Tavin’s lathe.
“The valve is fine,” she said. “The cold is in the gate.”
He looked at her over his spectacles. “Then who do I pay?”
She had no answer. She set the valve down on the cloth bundle of his files.
“I’ll make you a handle,” she said. “That’s what’s broken.”
“And then I’ll have a working valve and no gas to put through it.”
“Yes.”
He laughed, a short dry sound with no pleasure in it, and put the valve back under the bench.
She was turning to go when she noticed the grate. The stall had a small iron brazier at one end, for warming hands on a working day, and its grate was a set of six cast bars across the fire basket. One of them sat a hair lower than the others. Nothing she would have seen from the lane. She took the file from her apron pocket and tapped each bar with the tip, one after another, lightly, tink, tink, tink.
Five rang. The fourth went dull, a soft dead knock, and the graft gave her nothing at all, which in cast iron meant a crack through the whole section.
“That one,” she said, and pointed. “Fourth from the left. It’s cracked through. If you light the brazier with that bar in, it’ll drop the coals on your boots.”
He leaned over and looked at the bar. He tapped it himself, with a knuckle, and listened, and she watched him not hear anything.
“You’re sure.”
“Yes.”
He sat back. After a moment he said, “I’ll move the stove into the back room, then. If I’m going to light anything.” It was not quite thanks. She did not need it to be.
At the foot of the bridge stairs there was a drain, a square iron grid in the cobbles where the gutter water ran down into the old culvert. It had frozen over that morning, and a child of about seven was crouched beside it with a short iron bar, breaking the ice. The child’s hands were bare. Each blow sent a white chip skittering, and the child’s knuckles were red and raw, cracked at the joints.
“Use a rag,” Mara said. “Wrap the bar. Your hands will split.”
The child looked up at her. Small face, blue lips. A girl, Mara thought, though under the cap it was hard to tell.
“Why do you look frightened?” the child asked.
Mara had not known she looked like anything. She thought about the dimming, and the way nobody had looked up, and the sour note in the cables.
“I’m measuring,” she said.
The child considered this, then went back to the ice without a rag.
Mara climbed the bridge stairs. At the top she stopped and looked out over the Low Brace: the roofs, the towers, the yards, the long grey line of the dormitory blocks to the south, the domes of the crop farms on the horizon catching the light like blisters. From up here she could see the rich districts too, far off to the west, on the rising ground beyond the river. They were green. Even this late in the year, even after a tithe, the private orchards on the western slope held their color. The rich bought their own noon. Everyone knew it. The orchards had their own lamp feeds, licensed from the Directorate at a price nobody in the Low Brace could imagine, and their light never dimmed.
Or it dimmed, and nobody in the Low Brace saw.
“Mara!”
Tavin’s voice, from the yard gate below the bridge’s far end. She could see him there, a heavy shape in the gateway with his hand up to shade his eyes. He was looking at the sky.
“Come back,” he shouted. “Before it changes again.”
She went down the far stairs at a run, the bolts clanking in the sack on her shoulder. Behind her the light held. It held, and held, and she counted it the way she counted everything, in the three lines of the song, without humming. One full verse. Two. On the third line of the third verse she felt it waver, the faintest thinning on her neck, and then it steadied and climbed back to full, and she was at the gate and Tavin was taking the sack from her shoulder without a word.
“It went twice today,” she said.
“I know.”
“Does anyone know why?”
He looked at her without blinking. Then he went inside with the bolts without answering, and she stood in the gateway with her hands empty and looked up at Hearth, burning on above the rooftops as though nobody on Cinder were waiting on it.