Sera took the first watch of the night and sent Mara to the warm bunk, and Mara lay there for an hour with her eyes open and the distress band still murmuring faintly through the cabin wall, and then she gave up and got the sealed case.
She left notebook I closed. She had read it, or as much of it as the pain behind her ear allowed. She left II shut, which was all procedure, steps she could not follow, diagrams of things she could not name. She opened III.
III was different from the other two. The front half was procedure like the others. But the back half, she had found the night before they lifted, was household. Like the pages at the back of I that Pell had copied, but more of them, and older, as if her mother had kept the house’s accounts in this book first and only later begun to use it for the craft.
She turned to them now, under the bunk’s small lamp, with the net pulled back.
Neat columns. Her mother had kept them like a clerk: the date down the left, then the item, then the amount, then a final column she had headed owed. Bread. Barley. Lamp oil. Coal, by the sack, with the price per sack beside it, rising down the page. A line that said M., new soles, 2 coin. A line that said P., coat, secondhand, from the market, 5 coin — too big, will grow. Mara read that one twice.
Check P.’s boots before winter, in the margin, underlined.
Debts. A column of them on one page, each with a name: the coal merchant, the clinic, a neighbor who had lent money for the rent one month. Each with a figure, and some with a line through them, paid, and some without.
Mara noticed the handwriting.
It was always the same hand, the slanted quick hand she knew from the boot labels and the envelope and the spines. But it changed with the subject. Where her mother had written the children’s things, the shoe sizes, the coat, the note about Pell’s boots, the hand was easy, the letters loose and round, the lines running straight across the page. Where she had written the debts, the hand went tight. The letters pulled in on themselves and pressed hard into the paper, so hard that on one page Mara could feel the figures through from the back.
She sat with the book open on her knees and understood that she was reading her mother’s fear, an older one than the fear she had brought back from her last expedition, the one she would not name. The ordinary fear of a woman alone with two children and a coal bill.
These pages recorded a house.
The link chimed.
It was the Tern’s relay channel, not the distress band; a short double tone, the signal for a message arriving. Mara heard Sera in the cockpit flick a switch, and then Sera’s voice, without inflection: “For you. From Cinder. It came through the long relay at the Hearth buoy. Took a while.”
Mara climbed out of the bunk and went forward. Sera had printed it on the small console printer: a strip of paper, curling, with a few lines of type.
From: P. Venn, Rusk’s yard, Low Brace.
1. Are you warm? 2. Where are you? 3. When do you come back?
That was all. Numbered, like everything Pell wrote. Mara stood in the cockpit with the strip of paper in her hand and found that her eyes had gone hot.
“Can I answer?” she said.
“Keep it short. The relay charges by the word, and the long relay charges double.” Sera turned the console’s small keyboard toward her. “And don’t say where we are.”
Mara thought about it. Then she typed:
1. Yes. Warm bunk. Sera gave it to me. 2. On the road. Near where Sera’s sister is. 3.
She stopped at three. She sat with her fingers on the keys.
She did not know. That was the truth. When she would come back, or how, or whether; what the ash gate was, what was behind it, how long the school would take, how long Lorn’s lamp had left: she had an answer for none of it. She could not write soon. She could not write a week. Every number she might put there would be a guess, and Pell would write it down in his book, and then he would wait for it.
She typed: 3. I don’t know.
She sent it. The console chimed. The message went out into the dark toward the Hearth buoy and the long relay, and Mara went back to the bunk and sat with notebook III open on her knees and waited, though she knew it might be hours.
It was less than one. The relay chimed again.
From: P. Venn.
Then say you don’t know. I’ll write it down and not guess.
She read it several times.
Then she went back to the console and typed again. This time she sent an instruction. She copied a page from notebook III, one of the household pages, the one with the coal prices and the line about Pell’s coat. She typed it out exactly, column by column, the dates and the items and the amounts. The relay would charge double. She did not care. At the bottom she typed:
Copy the rest of these when I bring the book home. For now, copy this one into your book. So the house keeps a record of itself while I’m gone.
She sent it.
Sera, in the pilot’s seat, had watched her type the whole page. She said nothing about the cost. When Mara stood up, Sera said, “Your brother counts things.”
“Yes.”
“Good,” Sera said. “Somebody should.”
Mara went aft. She stayed away from the bunk. She stood in the narrow passage by the feed lines, where the valve stencils were, and put her palm on the Tern’s inner hull.
She did it without thinking, the way she put her hand on any metal she was about to trust. The hull was cold under her palm. Through it came the engine’s chord, steady, the hum of the drive, and the small sounds of a ship at night: the creak of a frame, the tick of a cooling line.
She listened through the graft.
The first tone she heard was a bell.
A single deep note, round and sweet, swelling and dying. A bell. She stood with her palm on the hull and her heart going fast, because there were no bells on the Tern, and the last time she had heard a bell in metal it had been the old yard gate bell, three years melted, playing over a valve housing in the back shed while a line of pain opened along her skull.
She held still. She waited for the pain.
It did not come. She listened again. The note came again, round, swelling. And under it, now that she was listening for it, something else: a catch. A small stutter, regular, coming from somewhere behind her left ear, not from the hull at all.
She took her palm off the hull. The note stopped. She put it back. The note came, and with it the stutter.
The bell was a tone from the hull, a frame resonating with the drive, a deep round note that her ear had wanted to make into a bell because it was tired and far from home and had been thinking about the yard. And the stutter was the graft itself, a small flaw in the way it carried the sound, a catch she had heard before on long listens and never named.
“No,” she said aloud, under her breath, to herself. “One tone and a stutter from the graft. Write the stutter.”
She took out her notebook and wrote it. In the left column, under today: Tern hull, aft passage. Deep round tone (drive resonance in frame). Heard first as a bell. Not a bell. And under it, a new line: Stutter: graft, not hull. Regular. Behind left ear.
She looked at the third column, the empty one she had ruled in the shed and never named. She wrote nothing in it. But she looked at it for a while, and thought that she was beginning to understand what it might be for.
“Approach in two hours,” Sera called from the cockpit. “Lorn’s Reach. Get some sleep. You’ll want it.”
Mara went back to the bunk. Notebook III lay where she had left it, open on the mattress at the household pages, the coal prices and the coat too big for Pell and the line about his boots. She closed the book with the household page still marked under her finger and put it back in the sealed case, and lay down. Pell’s third number was still unanswered. She had no idea how to answer it, and she had told him so, and he had said he would not guess.