The boy from the heater room door followed her back up the stair.
He walked a few steps behind her, the way a stray dog follows someone who has once fed it, not close enough to be sent away. At the top of the stair, in the corridor outside the warm classroom, she stopped and turned around, and he stopped too.
He was perhaps seven. Dark hair cut badly, as if with kitchen scissors. A face that was mostly eyes. The coat was a man’s work coat with the sleeves rolled four times, and the scarf around his neck was knitted from three different colors of yarn, each one running out and the next one starting.
He held out a piece of paper.
Mara took it. It was a page torn from an exercise book, ruled in faint blue lines, and on it someone had drawn a sun in thick black crayon: a circle with rays coming out of it in all directions, the way every child on every world draws a sun. Around the middle of the circle, wound twice, was a bandage. A white strip, drawn in chalk over the crayon, with a small knot at one side and two loose ends hanging down.
A sun with a bandage on it.
Mara held it by its edges, carefully, the way she would hold a drawing on a Founder plate.
“Did you draw this?” she said.
The boy nodded.
“Who taught you that suns can be hurt?”
He did not answer in words. He turned and pointed across the corridor, through the open door of the room opposite, a smaller classroom that had been turned into an office. Nemi was in there, at a table, bent over her clipboard with a pencil, working down the list. She kept her head down over it.
The boy pointed at her, and kept pointing, until Mara nodded. Then he lowered his arm.
“What’s your name?” Mara asked.
He looked at her for a moment as though deciding whether she was owed it.
“Joss,” he said.
Then he turned and went into the warm classroom and sat down at the end of a bench beside the girl in the red cap, and put his hands on the table in front of him, palms down, and did not rub them.
Mara stood in the corridor with the drawing. A sun with a bandage. She thought of the lamp outside the dome, the dim orange disc rippling every few minutes like a coal under breath. She thought of the shelter figures on the distress band, the allocation notice, the five bright marks on the heater seal. She thought of Nemi teaching a room full of children, with nine degrees on the thermometer and thirty hours of fuel, that the sun was hurt, the kind of hurt that could be bandaged.
She folded the drawing in half, then in half again, and took notebook III out of the sealed case in her bag and laid the drawing inside it, at the back, between the household pages. Beside it, in the margin of the coal-price page, she wrote: Joss, sun, bandage, and the date, the real one, the way Pell would want.
Sera was on the dock, unloading the last of Tavin’s reject crate onto the deck plates to make room in the Tern’s hold. Mara walked out through the archway into the orange light and found her there, crouched by a sack of slag.
“The heater was capped,” Mara said. “Remotely. The building could hold its heat another day if the heater ran full, and somebody set a ceiling on it from outside. And the seal has fresh tool marks. Five of them. Same angle, same depth. Made around the time the output dropped.” She took a breath. “I think Lorn’s failure has been helped along.”
Sera went on unloading, working down the hold in the order she had packed it. She lifted the sack of slag onto the stack and straightened and wiped her hands on her trousers.
“A theory doesn’t fly the ship,” she said.
“I know.”
“A theory doesn’t warm the school either.”
“No.” Mara held up her notebook, open to the page with the marks. “But this one says that if someone capped the heaters, then the heaters can be uncapped. All of them, in every room. And if someone helped Lorn’s lamp fail, then maybe the lamp isn’t failing the way the Compact says. Maybe it can be—” She stopped. She did not want to say fixed. She had no right to say it. She knew nothing yet.
“Can be what?” Sera said.
“Heat for every room is the one I can prove,” Mara said. “The heater was capped. I uncapped one channel. That’s what I know. The rest is the gate.”
Sera looked at her for a long time. Then she looked past her, through the archway, at the school’s lit windows beyond the sheeted lanes.
Nemi came out onto the dock. She had her clipboard against her chest, and she walked straight to them and stopped, and looked from one to the other.
“Joss gave you his drawing,” she said to Mara. It was not a question.
“Yes.”
“He’s given it to nobody else. He’s drawn a sun with a bandage every day for a month and given every one of them to me.” Nemi’s voice stayed flat, but something in her face changed. “He likes you, then. Don’t make him regret it.”
“Nemi,” Sera said. “We need to decide this now.”
They decided it on the dock, the three of them, standing in the cold between the stacked sacks and the Tern’s open hold, with the orange light flickering over them every few minutes as the lamp breathed.
It was a hard division, and Mara knew it as they made it. Nemi would stay. She would organize the shelters: move the children who could be moved into the school’s one warm room and the hall next to it, finish the list, bring in the people from the outer domes who could still walk, ration the barley and the fuel. She would not leave, and nobody tried to make her.
Sera would give Mara one flight to the ash gate. One. The Tern would go up from the dock, fly the approach to the gate at the edge of Lorn’s corona, put Mara inside whatever the gate turned out to be, and wait.
“And if there’s nothing there,” Sera said, “if the forge is a ruin, or a trap, or a pile of rocks with a name on it, if there’s no practical hope at all, then the Tern comes back here. For passengers. And we start flying children off this world as fast as I can fly them. And you help me.”
“If the forge offers nothing,” Mara said, “I’ll help you.”
“Not nothing. No practical hope. You’ll want to stay and look at it. You’ll want to understand it. I know that look.” Sera’s voice was hard. “If it can’t warm a room, we leave it.”
Mara thought of the five marks on the heater seal, the red number in its window. One room.
“If it can’t warm a room,” she said, “we leave it.”
Nemi had listened to all of this without speaking. Now she said, to Sera: “You’ll take the list.”
“I’ll take the list.”
“The whole list. Not the top twenty.”
“I’ll take the whole list as fast as I can take it.”
Mara said, before Nemi could go: “The girl who won’t speak. The blank line. Has anyone tried drawing with her? Joss draws.”
Nemi stopped. She looked at Mara as though she had said something in a language Nemi had not expected her to know.
“No,” she said slowly. “Nobody’s tried that.” She turned the clipboard over in her hands. “I’ve been asking her questions. Name, street, mother. She shuts her eyes when I ask.” A pause. “Joss doesn’t ask anyone anything.”
“Then maybe he’s the one to sit with her.”
Nemi offered no thanks. She wrote something in the margin of the clipboard, quickly, and Mara saw that it was the word Joss beside the blank line, with an arrow.
Nemi looked at her sister a moment longer. Then she nodded, once, and turned and went back through the archway toward the school, holding the clipboard against her chest.
Sera checked her wrist. She had a watch there, an old rescue-service watch with a scratched face, and she held it up and looked from it to the dock clock on the wall above the archway, a big round clock with its glass cracked across. She compared them. She adjusted the watch’s crown a quarter turn.
“The Tern leaves on the next cycle,” she said. “Two hours. Whatever the forge run takes, we leave in two hours, and we’re back in—” She stopped. She had no idea how long. Neither of them did.
“One flight,” Mara said.
“One flight,” Sera said. “Then we come back for everyone we can carry, whatever the gate says.”