On the second day the link began to pick up voices.
They came in faintly at first, under the hiss of the open band, a murmur Mara could barely separate from the static. Sera turned up the gain. The murmur sharpened into words, and the words into people, and then there were too many people, all talking at once, on top of each other, so that the cabin filled with voices and Mara could not follow any one of them.
“Lorn’s distress band,” Sera said. She sat with her hand on the gain knob and left it where it was. “Every shelter, every dome, every relay station on Lorn’s Reach broadcasts on it. Has done for months. There’s nobody listening, so they all just talk.”
Mara listened.
A woman’s voice, steady and tired, reading figures: “Shelter four, east dome, heat at nine degrees, nine degrees, we have sixty-two in the hall and fuel for thirty hours at current draw. Shelter four, east dome—” It repeated. It had been repeating for a long time; Mara could hear it in the cadence, the way a phrase goes smooth from saying.
Under it, a child. A girl, by the voice, perhaps eight or nine, reading a list. “Tamsk Orrell. Ilan Brannen. Orsa Daw. Marit. Just Marit. Pell—” Mara’s hand tightened on the frame. “—Pellas Carse. Joss Varrin.” The list went on. The child read it to the end and then started again from the top. Tamsk Orrell. Ilan Brannen. The same names, in the same order, the same small careful voice. Reading it twice. Three times.
And under both, metallic, perfect, an automated voice that did not breathe: “Allocation notice. Residential sector heat allocation reduced to forty percent of standard. Allocation notice. Residential sector heat allocation reduced to forty percent of standard.”
Over and over. The woman, the child, the machine, and a dozen fainter voices beneath them, all speaking into a band that nobody was listening to.
Mara stood in the cabin doorway and found she was gripping the frame.
She wanted to answer them. It was absurd; the Tern’s link could transmit, but a voice from a passing freighter would mean nothing to a shelter warden reading figures into the dark, and Sera had said not to announce themselves. Still she wanted to lean over the console and say I hear you, I heard the figures, sixty-two in the hall, thirty hours. She wanted somebody on Lorn’s Reach to know that one of the voices had been heard, even once, even by someone who could do nothing about it.
She kept her hands off the console. She stood and listened, because listening was the only thing she could do, and she made herself hear every name.
Sera reached over and adjusted the viewport filter, and the cockpit glass darkened, and through it, ahead and a little to the left, Mara saw Lorn.
She had seen it on charts. On the Compact’s chart in the records hall, a gold circle. On the Founder plate, a cutaway. In the school primer, a smiling sun. None of them had prepared her for this. It was a dim orange disc, much dimmer than Hearth, a dull glow like a coal in a grate at the end of the night. And it flickered irregularly, nothing like a candle. It would hold, and hold, and then a ripple would run across its face, a dimming and brightening, like a coal when someone breathes on the ash. Then it would hold again. Then another ripple.
The charts had not shown the flicker. The charts could not have; they were drawings. But Mara had not imagined it either. She had imagined a lamp failing the way a lamp in a room fails, steadily dimming. She had never pictured a sun breathing unevenly, like something sick.
“Every few minutes,” Sera said. “It’s been doing that for weeks, the relays say. Getting worse.”
Mara looked at it. She thought of the register’s margin. Dawn late (2). Dawn late (6). Unstable. This was what unstable looked like.
“The ash gate,” Mara said. “That’s why we came. The courier said—”
Sera was already turning the ship.
She did it without a word, before Mara had finished the sentence. A touch on the controls, and the Tern’s nose came around, away from the flickering disc and toward something below it and to the right, a small pale dot that Mara had not noticed: a world. Lorn’s Reach.
“The gate isn’t cold,” Sera said. “The school is.”
“Sera—”
“The dome dock at Lorn’s Reach is closer than the gate approach. Half a day closer. The Tern can make one landing at the dock before the gate run. One.” Sera’s hands moved on the controls, setting a course. “My sister’s school is under the east dome. You heard the shelter figures. Nine degrees. Thirty hours of fuel.”
“Every day on the school is a day the forge loses.” Mara heard her own voice rise and could not stop it. “If there’s a forge. If the gate opens. If there’s anything there at all. The lamp is flickering, Sera. You saw it. You heard the allocation. If the lamp goes, the school goes too, and every school, and every dome—”
“The forge is a machine,” Sera said. She spoke without raising her voice or turning around. “The dome has people in the cold.”
Mara stopped.
She stood in the doorway with her hand on the frame and the voices from the distress band all around her, the woman’s figures and the child’s names and the machine’s notice, and she thought of something she had not thought of in two days, not since the Tern lifted.
The widow’s heat pump.
Ines Toller’s pump, on the bench under the work lamp, with its worn collar. Mara had looked at the collar and heard the squeal and diagnosed it in seconds and fixed it in twenty minutes, perfectly. She had made the pump do exactly what the job asked. She had not looked past the collar. She had not looked at the pipe, or the ceiling, or the child asleep under three blankets and a coat. The pump had run beautifully for eleven minutes.
Every machine had people at its far end. Tavin had said it a thousand times, in a different sentence, and now it was chalked on the wall above the bench, under the three steps. If there was a forge at the ash gate, and if she could do anything there, and if it saved Lorn, then the people at its far end were these people. The woman reading figures. The child reading names. If the school froze while she was at the gate, then whatever she did at the gate would be a pump that ran beautifully for eleven minutes.
She let go of the doorframe.
“All right,” she said. “The school first.”
Sera’s shoulders moved a little. Not much.
“But we go to the gate after,” Mara said. “As soon as the school is clear. However fast we can. Because if Lorn collapses—” She left it unfinished. She did not need to. They both knew what the register said came after unstable.
“As soon as the school is clear,” Sera agreed.
She did not say thank you. Mara had not expected her to.
Mara knew what she was agreeing to. The children’s list on the distress band. Thirty hours of fuel. A lamp that flickered every few minutes and was getting worse. Every hour they spent at the dome was an hour the lamp spent closer to whatever came after flickering, and nobody, not Mara, not Sera, not the woman reading figures into the dark, knew how many hours were left. She agreed to it anyway, because the other choice was a pump that ran for eleven minutes.
Sera reached up and took a slip of paper from a clip over the console, a printed card with a line of figures on it, and held it out over her shoulder without turning.
“Dock coordinates,” she said. “Lorn’s Reach, east dome, landing ring two. Read them back.”
Mara took the card. She read the figures aloud, carefully, one at a time.
“Again,” Sera said.
Mara read them again, her finger moving under each figure the way Tavin had taught her to read a parts list.
“Why twice?”
“Because the first time you read them, you’re reading them to me,” Sera said. “Read them back. Once more. The third time is for the dock.”
At first Mara could not see why. She read them a third time, slowly, and as she did, she heard what Sera meant: the first reading had been a check, a confirmation between the two of them. This one was for the record. For the dock’s log, the approach controller, whoever on Lorn’s Reach would be waiting at landing ring two with a list in her hand. It was the reading somebody else would rely on.
Behind them, on the distress band, the child came to the end of her list and started again from the top.