Sera was at the foot of the ramp with a hand lamp shaded in her fist and her eyes on a gauge set into the hull beside the hatch.
“Fuel,” she said, without looking up, as Mara reached her. “Tanks are full. That’s enough for a run to Lorn and back, with a margin, if nothing goes wrong. Which it will.” She tapped the gauge glass with a fingernail. “So here’s the rule. We fly out on the outbound half. The return half stays in the tanks. We don’t touch the return. Whatever happens. If we run short going out, we stop. We don’t burn the way home to get somewhere faster.”
“Understood.”
“Say it.”
“We don’t touch the return.”
“Good.” Sera straightened. She held out her hand. “Chip.”
Mara gave her the navigation chip. Sera turned it over in the lamp light, checked something on its edge, and gave it back.
“You hold it,” she said. “And the coordinates. If something happens to me, if I’m hurt, if I’m dead, you’ll need them to get the ship somewhere. You can’t fly it, but you can give it to someone who can. Keep the chip on you. Not in a bag.”
Mara put the chip in the inner pocket of her coat, beside Tavin’s food packet.
“In,” Sera said.
The inside of the Tern was smaller than Mara had imagined. A narrow cabin behind the cockpit, two seats bolted to the deck facing forward, a third folding seat on the wall. A bunk against the bulkhead, a thin mattress on a shelf, with a net across it to keep a sleeper from rolling out. Lockers. The smell of oil and old coffee and cold metal. Everything worn, everything patched, everything tied down.
“Notebooks on the bunk,” Sera said, climbing past her into the cockpit. “Under the net. Then sit. The right-hand seat, not the left. The left rattles.”
Mara unbuttoned her coat and took the notebooks out of the harness, one by one, and laid them on the bunk under the net, side by side, I, II, III. She kept the hammer in its pocket. She kept the harness on. She sat in the right-hand seat and found the straps and buckled them across her shoulders and waist.
The left-hand seat, empty beside her, gave a small loose rattle as Sera started the engines.
It was a low sound at first, below hearing, felt more than heard, a vibration in the deck and in the seat and in Mara’s back teeth. Then it rose. The graft woke to it at once and gave her the whole engine, every part of it at once, a great chord of turning and burning and straining, and under the chord, faint, near the intake, the hairline crack she had heard when the Tern first came down: a thin high whine, like a reed. She noted it. She would patch it in the air. That was the plan.
“Hold on,” Sera said from the cockpit.
The Tern lifted.
There were no lights. Sera had turned off everything: the running lights, the hull lamps, the cabin glow. The only light was the faint green of the instruments in the cockpit, and the stars through the port. The ship rose off the frozen ground of the bay in darkness, slowly, its engines held low, and slid sideways over the yard fence, so close that Mara could have touched the top of it through the hull.
“We’re a waste hauler,” Sera said, half to herself. “Bound for the far scrap rings. Nothing anyone wants to look at. Nothing worth a second scan.”
They climbed.
Mara turned in her seat and pressed her face to the port.
The Low Brace fell away below her. She had never seen it from above. She had seen it from the bridge stairs and the yard roof, but never like this: the whole district spread out at once in the dark, a sprawl of roofs and lanes and yards, the long grey blocks of the dormitories, the dark curve of the river, the towers. The lamps of the Directorate quarter burned in a bright cluster to the west. The Low Brace had almost none. A few windows. A few street lamps. The rest of it was dark, a darker black against the black ground, cold.
She found the yard. She knew where it was by the dark bulk of the melt shed and the long mound of the slag pit along the back fence. It was a small dark square among other dark squares.
One lamp still burned in it.
The work lamp at the bench. She could see it through the bench window, a single small point of yellow, steady, in the middle of the dark yard.
She counted it. One. There was no reason to count it, but she did. It was one lamp; there was nothing to count. She counted it anyway, the way she counted everything, and she knew which lamp it was. It was the lamp Tavin left lit every night so that the sweeping could be finished.
She had not swept. She had left without sweeping. The lamp burned anyway.
The ship turned. The yard slid out of the port. Below, across the whole spread of the district, the light changed.
It was very small. She would not have seen it from the ground. From up here, with the whole Low Brace laid out beneath her, she saw every street lamp and every lit window dim at once, all together, the yellow points going faint and brown, and then, after a heartbeat, come back. A dimming. Hearth, below the horizon, losing its hold on the path for one breath and finding it again, and the whole district on its feed answering.
Nobody below would have looked up.
And above the district, to the east, over the towers, where Hearth’s glow should have been rising faintly behind the curve of the world even at this hour, the sky was thinner. She could not put it more exactly than that. The dark quarter of the sky, where the sun slept, was a little less dark than it should have been and a little less bright, as if a lamp behind a curtain had been turned down. She had never noticed it from the ground. Perhaps it had always been like that. Perhaps it had not.
The Tern climbed. The district shrank. Somewhere down there the guards were still at the yard’s main gate, watching the wrong door.
The ship shuddered as it crossed a band of turbulence, and in the side pocket of the harness the hammer slid a little and knocked, softly, against something hard through the leather. The stub. In its sewn pocket by the buckle, against her collarbone. The two of them, the hammer and the unnamed thing, knocking together against her chest in the dark.
She put her palm over the harness and held it there.
She could feel her heart under her hand, under the leather and the felt and the place where the notebooks had been. She could feel the hammer’s weight, and the hard small shape of the stub, and her own breathing. She held her hand there while the ship climbed and the engines’ chord filled her head and the crack in the intake whined its thin high note.
Below, the lights of Cinder were a scatter now, then a smudge, then a faint glow at the edge of the port.
Ahead, through the cockpit glass, Mara could see a line of small faint lights in the dark, evenly spaced, stretching away across the sky to either side. Marker buoys. The edge of the Directorate’s inspection grid, where every ship leaving Cinder was scanned and logged and, if anyone cared to, stopped.
Sera had not told her the plan for the grid. She had not asked. She looked at the line of lights coming closer, and at Sera’s shoulders in the cockpit, and she found that she knew what she wanted, and that she could say it.
“Take us out past the patrol grid,” she said.
Sera did not turn around. She did not ask why Mara had said it, or what she meant by it, or whether she had the right to say it. Her hands moved on the controls, and the Tern’s nose dipped, and the ship slid down and to the left, into a shadow Mara could not see, toward a gap between two of the faint buoy lights where there should not have been a gap.
The grid passed under the hull. Mara kept her palm on the harness, and the hammer lay still against the stub, and the last glow of Cinder went out of the port behind them.
Whatever the Tern would meet on the far side, she had the chip in her pocket and the notebooks on the bunk and a dead man’s coordinates in Sera’s head, and a promise she had not yet made, and she was going.