The school’s technician was a man of about sixty with a grey beard gone yellow at the corners of his mouth and a ring of keys on his belt that rang like a tambourine when he walked. His name was stitched on his coat, but the stitching had worn away to three letters, and Mara never learned the rest. He walked her through the school’s back corridors with a hand lamp, past classrooms where children sat in coats around tables, past a hall where cots stood in rows, to a steel door at the end of a stair.
“Heater room,” he said, and unlocked it.
It was the warmest room in the building, and it was not warm. The heater stood against the far wall, a big squat cabinet of green-painted steel with a bank of pipes running out of its top into the ceiling, and a control panel set into its front. The panel’s needles were all low. The pipes, when Mara laid her hand on them, were barely warm.
“What’s wrong with it?” she said.
“Nothing.” The technician set his lamp on a shelf. “That’s the joke. There’s nothing wrong with it. The burner’s good. The pipes are good. The building’s insulation is better than half the domes on this side of the Reach. Old stuff, but thick. If this heater were running full, the school could hold its heat another full day on what fuel we’ve got. Maybe a day and a half.”
“So why isn’t it running full?”
He tapped the control panel. “Capped.”
He showed her. On the panel, below the needles, there was a small square window, and behind it a number glowing faint red: a limit. A ceiling on how much power the heater was allowed to draw. It was set low, very low, a fraction of what the heater was built for.
“Remote,” the technician said. “Somebody set that from outside. Not from this room. From the dome control, or further. I can’t change it. Nobody here can. It takes a code we don’t have.”
Mara watched the red number for a while. Then she knelt and looked at the heater’s maintenance seal.
It was on the cabinet’s side, low down, where the inspection plate was bolted: a round metal plate with a pattern of lines on it, the same kind of seal she had seen on the locked cabinet in Halvek’s inner office, the one the white rod had been ticking against. A Compact maintenance seal. The pattern was old and worn smooth.
But at its edge, where the seal met the plate, there were marks. Fresh ones. Bright scratches in the dull metal, a few of them, short and straight, cut at an angle into the seal’s rim. They shone under the hand lamp the way new cuts in old metal always shone, clean and silver against the grey.
Someone had been at this seal. Recently.
She took out her notebook and copied them. She did it carefully, in her measuring hand, the way she would copy a crack on a casting for Tavin: each mark’s position on the rim, by the clock, twelve at the top; its length, which she measured against the edge of her rule; its angle, which she judged by eye and wrote as a slope; and how deep it seemed, which she guessed from the way the light caught the bottom of each cut. Five marks. All at the same angle. All about the same depth, too regular for a careless hand. Something had been fitted against the seal’s rim and turned, or levered, or pressed, five times.
“Who’s been at this?” she said.
The technician crouched beside her and looked. His face did something she could not read.
“Inspection crew,” he said. “Compact. They came through, oh, two weeks back. Maybe a little less. Said they were checking equipment ahead of the allocation review. Went room to room. Spent a long time in here.” He paused. “The output dropped the day after.”
“Who set the cap?”
“The seal says Compact inspection.” He stood up, slowly, his knees cracking. “The paperwork doesn’t say whose hand.”
Mara looked at the five bright marks. She thought of the white rod in Halvek’s office, its capped tip resting against the round plate on the cabinet, ticking. Reading the seal. She had no idea what a white rod would leave on a seal’s rim if it did more than read. She wrote the question down, below the marks, in small letters: what tool?
Then she stood up and looked at the red number in its window.
“Is there a port?” she said. “A control port? For a programmer?”
The technician showed her: a small socket under a hinged cover beside the window. A Compact-standard port.
Mara took out the navigation chip.
She had carried it in her inner coat pocket since the yard, since Sera told her to keep it on her, not in a bag. It was warm from her body. Sera’s chip, payment for a landing claw, with routes on it that were not on the public charts. A Compact port.
It might not work. She knew how ports worked; every piece of salvage in the yard with a control in it had one, and she had spent three years learning which ones talked to which. A navigation chip was built to talk to a ship’s console, to tell it where to go. It was also built to accept override codes, because a pilot needed to be able to force a course through a lane controller that disagreed. If the heater’s cap had been set through this port by a code the technician did not have, perhaps a chip built to override lane controllers could talk the heater’s controller out of its ceiling. Or perhaps it would do nothing. Or perhaps it would burn out the port and the chip with it.
She seated the chip in the port.
The Tern’s short-range link chimed on her collar, where Sera had clipped it on the dock; the yard’s call clip was dead this far from Cinder. Sera’s voice came through the link, small and tight.
“That chip was payment, Venn.”
Mara froze. She looked at the clip on her collar. Of course; the link worked both ways, and Sera had been listening. Of course she had.
“I know,” Mara said.
“It has my routes on it. Some of them nobody else has.”
“I know.”
A pause. A long one.
“Then don’t break it,” Sera said, and the link went quiet.
Mara pressed the chip into the port until it clicked. The heater’s panel flickered. The red number in its window jumped, wavered, went dark, came back, a different number. Higher. Much higher. The chip had found something: a gap, a channel, a way past the code. The number held.
Somewhere inside the cabinet a burner caught with a soft deep whump.
The needles on the panel began to climb.
The technician made a small sound beside her. Neither of them moved. They watched the needles climb, slowly, and they listened to the pipes over their heads begin to tick as heat came into them, tick and tick and tick, faster, the metal expanding, the warmth running out along the ceiling toward the classrooms.
It did not reach all of them. The chip’s override had found only one channel; the heater’s feed split three ways, and only one of the three valves opened. Mara followed the warm pipe with her hand along the corridor ceiling, out of the heater room and up the stair and along the hall, past the cots, to a door at the end.
She opened it.
It was a classroom. Twenty children, perhaps more, sitting at long tables in their coats, two and three to a bench, with a young woman at the front holding a book. Every one of them had their hands together in front of them, rubbing, the way people rub their hands in the cold without thinking, a constant small movement, a room full of it.
The vents along the wall below the windows had begun to breathe.
Warm air. Mara could see it, the faint shimmer above the grilles. The nearest child, a girl with a red cap, stopped rubbing her hands. Then the boy beside her. Then the whole table. One by one, along the benches, the children stopped rubbing their hands and turned and stared at the vents, the way people stare at something they have heard about and never seen. The young woman with the book lowered it and stared too.
Nobody said anything. The vents breathed. The room warmed.
It was a small repair. One room, out of a whole school. One valve out of three. A chip she had no right to spend, seated in a port she did not fully understand, overriding a cap whose reason she could not guess. But the children had stopped rubbing their hands, and that was a result she could see.
She went back to the heater room. The technician was still standing in front of the panel, watching the needles.
“It’s holding,” he said.
“One channel. The other two valves are still capped. I don’t know how to reach them.” She knelt again by the seal and looked at the five bright marks on its rim.
They were the kind of marks a tool makes. Any tool, fitted to a seal the right way. They were the kind of marks someone else could have made, someone who was not a Compact inspector, someone who had wanted Lorn’s school to lose its heat and wanted the paperwork to say Compact. Or they were exactly what they looked like. She could not tell which, and she said nothing about it. She wrote the question in her notebook instead, under the marks, under what tool?: whose hand?
At the heater room door a small boy was standing. He must have come down from the classroom. He wore a coat too big for him and a scarf, and he looked at Mara with enormous eyes.
“Is the sun back?” he asked.
Mara looked at the panel, the needles holding at one channel’s worth, the red number in its window.
“One room,” she said.
She looked for a clock out of habit, found none, and asked the technician. He told her. She wrote it in the notebook beside the marks.