The hatch was still closed when Mara smelled Lorn’s Reach.
The Tern had come down on landing ring two of the east dome dock with a long shudder and a hiss of hydraulics, and Sera had shut down the engines and gone to the hatch, and in the moment before she opened it, while the dock’s pressure seal was still equalizing against the hull, a smell came through the seal’s vents. Wet insulation. That heavy, sour, mildewed smell of wall stuffing that has gotten damp and been left to dry and gotten damp again. And under it, boiled grain. Barley, or oats, cooked a long time in a big pot. The smell of a kitchen feeding a great many people with very little.
Then Sera opened the hatch, and the cold came in.
It was colder than the Tern had been. Colder than the yard on the worst winter morning. A damp cold that went through Mara’s coat at once and settled on her skin. She stepped down onto the dock and her breath smoked in front of her and the soles of her boots stuck slightly to the frost on the ring’s deck plates.
The dock was a long curved platform under a high dome of grey glass, and the light through the glass was the dim orange of the flickering lamp, so that everything had the color of an old photograph. Beyond the dock, through a wide archway, she could see the town: streets running away under the dome, low buildings of grey block and corrugated sheet. Or what had been streets. Many of them were closed. Walls of plastic sheeting had been hung across them, floor to ceiling, roped to lamp posts and building corners, sealing whole lanes off so that their air would not have to be heated. Behind the sheeting the lanes were dark.
The residents had folded their town up like a letter, Mara thought, and put everything that mattered into one small space.
She could see where. Beyond the sheeted lanes, near the dome’s center, two buildings had their windows lit: a long low one with a bell tower, and a taller one with a red cross painted on its side. The school and the hospital. Everything else was dark and sealed and cold.
A woman was waiting at the end of the landing ring.
She was smaller than Sera, and older, though not by much. Her hair was the same dark color but long, tied back under a knitted cap, and her face had the same bones. The same narrow jaw. The same grey eyes. She wore three coats, one over another, the outermost a man’s work coat far too big for her, and she was holding a clipboard against her chest with both arms, the way a person holds something they will not let anyone take.
She neither waved nor smiled. She watched Sera walk down the ring toward her, and when Sera was close enough, she said:
“You’re late.”
“I came as fast as I could.”
“You’re late anyway.” The woman stayed where she was. Then, after a moment, she reached out with one hand, still holding the clipboard with the other, and touched Sera’s sleeve. Just touched it. Then took her hand away.
“Nemi,” Sera said.
That was all. The two sisters stood at the end of the landing ring in the orange light and did not embrace. Mara, a few steps behind, looked at the place where Nemi’s hand had touched Sera’s sleeve, and understood that it had been an embrace.
Then Nemi looked past Sera at Mara, briefly, the look of a person counting heads, and then back at her sister.
“I have a list,” she said.
She held out the clipboard. On it was a sheet of paper, ruled in pencil, with a column of entries down the left side. Names. Some names. Many of the lines had a name and something after it. Some had only a name. Some had nothing.
“Children whose guardians can’t be found,” Nemi said. “Parents on the work crews at the outer domes when the roads were sealed. Parents in the hospital. Parents who went to find fuel and didn’t come back. Parents who were never on the register in the first place.” Her voice held steady. It was very like Sera’s: level, short, saying the worst things in the plainest words. “Forty-one children. Not all of them have a name beside every line yet.”
“Nemi, the Tern—”
“Name beside every line first,” Nemi said. “Then we talk about seats.”
Sera stopped.
“I mean it,” Nemi said. “I’m not putting a child on a ship with a blank line beside them. If they go to a shelter on another world with a blank line, they stay a blank line. Nobody comes for a blank line. Nobody can.” She held the clipboard steady. “Every line gets a name. Then you can tell me how many seats you have.”
Sera took a breath. Mara watched her decide, the way she had watched her decide at the claw, at the grid, at the distress band.
“The Tern carries twenty,” Sera said. “Safely. Twenty.”
“Safe means comfortable,” Nemi said, “or alive?”
“Alive is the only one I can fly.”
“Then fly the children first.” Nemi’s voice rose for the first time, not much, a small edge coming into it. “And stop calling the rest a rounding error.”
“I didn’t call anyone—”
“You will. You always do. You count the seats and then you count the people and then there’s a number left over and you call it the margin. You’ve done it since we were children. You did it with the lifeboats on the river ferry when I was eight.” Nemi’s arms were tight around the clipboard. “I’m not your margin, Sera, and neither are they.”
“And you’ll stand on this dock until the lamp goes out,” Sera said, “making sure every line has a name, while I wait with an empty ship, because you’d rather have a perfect list than an imperfect rescue.”
“I’d rather have both.”
“You can’t have both.”
“Then I’ll make the list perfect faster.”
They stood facing each other on the frozen dock, the two sisters with the same face, and neither of them stepped back. Mara watched. She had grown up with Pell’s arguments, his numbered points and his stubborn small voice, and she knew this sound. It was the sound of two people who had been having the same argument for twenty years and would go on having it for twenty more. Each one called the other’s duty stubbornness. Each one was right about the other. And neither was wrong.
“Give me the list,” Mara said.
Both sisters turned and looked at her as though they had forgotten she was there.
Mara held out her hand. After a moment, Nemi gave her the clipboard.
She looked at it. Forty-one lines. She worked down them. Neve Varrin, 7, mother at outer dome 3, father unknown. That was a full line. Tamsk Orrell, 6. Nothing else. Ilan Brannen, 9, grandmother in hospital ward 2. Full. Marit, 5. Just Marit. No family name, no age certain, nothing. Orsa Daw, 8. Nothing.
Mara thought of the child on the distress band, reading the names twice, three times. Tamsk Orrell. Ilan Brannen. Orsa Daw. Marit. Just Marit. This was the list. The child had been reading this list into the dark for anyone who might be listening.
She took the pencil from the clipboard’s clip and held it over the line beside Tamsk Orrell, 6. She began to write unknown.
Nemi’s hand came down over hers.
“No,” she said. “Not unknown. Never unknown.” She took her hand away. “Write the street. Where we found him. Write the door, if there’s a door. Write what he ate last and when. Write what he was wearing. Write anything that someone who knew him might recognize. Unknown is a word for a thing nobody’s looked at. He’s been looked at. Write what we saw.”
Mara looked at her.
“Hollow Lane,” Nemi said. “The blue door with the bent knocker. Barley at the shelter, yesterday, midday. A red scarf, knitted, too long for him. He wouldn’t take it off.”
Mara wrote it. Tamsk Orrell, 6. Found Hollow Lane, blue door, bent knocker. Ate barley at shelter, yesterday midday. Red knitted scarf, too long. Won’t take it off.
It was more than a name. It was a door someone could knock on.
She went down the list. Nemi gave her what she knew for each line: a street, a coat, a habit, a last meal. Sera stood beside them with her arms folded, and after a while she went back to the Tern and began unloading the parts crate onto the dock, with EDRIN facing up.
Near the bottom of the list there was a line with nothing on it at all, no name and no age: a blank line, ruled in pencil, empty.
Mara stopped.
“That one,” Nemi said, her voice dropping. “We don’t have anything for that one. Yet.”
“Is there a child?”
“There’s a child. In the school. She came in two nights ago with a crowd from the north lanes and nobody claimed her and she won’t speak.” Nemi looked at the empty line. “Every blank is a child with no one to answer for them. So I’m going to answer for her. Until someone else does.”
Mara stared at the blank line for a long time. Then she looked at the pencil in her hand. The point was worn almost flat.
Nemi took a second pencil out of her coat pocket, sharpened, and held it out.
“Pens freeze in the school,” she said. “Use this.”