They drew it on the school’s big table in chalk, because the school had chalk and nothing else to spare.
It was the table in the room Nemi used as an office, a long plank table scarred with a generation of children’s initials, and Nemi cleared it with one sweep of her arm, papers and pencils and a cold cup, and took a stick of chalk from her pocket and drew a rectangle on the bare wood. Then twenty small squares inside it, in four rows of five.
“Seats,” she said.
Mara stood across the table from her. Sera was at the Tern, running the pre-flight, and had told them to have a loading order on her airlock by the time she was done, and had not said what would happen if they did not.
“Children first,” Nemi said. She wrote in the squares as she spoke, a name or a number in each. “The smallest. The ones who can’t walk far. The ones in the hospital who can be moved. Then the adults who carry them. One adult for every three small children, or they won’t get off the ship at the other end without someone.” She filled the first three rows. “Then the people I can’t account for.”
“Which people?”
“The ones on the list with no one. The blanks. And the ones who came in from the outer domes in the last few days that nobody knows. If there are seats left, they get them.” She paused with the chalk over the fourth row. “They go last. And I write their last known door on the seat. So someone at the other end can find where they came from.”
Mara studied the twenty squares. Forty-one children on the list. Sixty-two in the shelter hall. The adults at the outer domes. The hospital, which had its own list that she had not seen.
“We can’t take everyone,” she said.
Nemi kept her eyes on the chalk.
“Then the list gets a second column,” she said.
She drew it. Beside the rectangle of twenty seats, a long line down the table, and at the top of the line she wrote: Next flight. And under it she began to write the names that would not fit, one under another, steadily, the way she had written them on the clipboard.
Mara watched her for a moment. Then she took a pencil and her notebook and began to check the plan against the Tern.
She knew the Tern now. She had walked every meter of it with the valve key, named every line. She knew the cabin’s air feed: one blue line with a brass wheel, four and a quarter turns. She knew how much air a person used, roughly, at rest, because Tavin had made her learn it for working in closed tanks, and she knew how much air the Tern’s cabin and hold could hold and how fast the feed could replace it. She knew the seat frames, because Sera had pointed them out to her in the hold: folding steel frames bolted to the deck, each with a rating stamped on its bracket, and she had read the ratings. She knew the weight limits, because they were stenciled on the hold’s bulkhead in faded red.
She did the arithmetic in the margin. Twenty people, mostly small. Air for the flight with a margin, if the feed held. Seat frames rated for adults, so small children could share some, two to a frame, which would free room but not air. Weight under the limit, just, if nobody brought more than a bag.
Then she looked at Nemi’s chalk squares again, at the fourth row, and frowned.
“This one,” she said, and put her finger on a square near the back. “And this one. You’ve got two small children here, side by side.”
“Two sisters. They won’t be separated.”
“They can stay together. But not there.” Mara drew the Tern’s hold on the table beside the rectangle, quickly, in rough lines: the frames, the bulkheads, the sealed bulkhead between the forward hold and the aft. “That square is behind the sealed bulkhead. If anything goes wrong in flight, if there’s a fire or a pressure drop, the crew seals that bulkhead, and anyone behind it is on their own. Two small children alone behind a sealed door.” She moved the girls’ names forward, to a square by the cabin door. “Here. Next to an adult. Where someone can reach them.”
Nemi looked at the change. She looked at Mara. She said nothing, but she rubbed out the old square with the heel of her hand and wrote the sisters’ names in the new one herself.
Nemi had begun on the fourth row. In the first square she wrote, small, not a name but a door: Hollow Lane, blue, bent knocker. Tamsk Orrell, with his scarf. In the next: Pump Row 9, upstairs, the window with the green cloth. In the next: found at the north sheeting, no door, a brown dog with him. She wrote each one carefully, as though it were the most important line on the table, and Mara understood that to Nemi it was. A door was a way back. A child with a door written beside them had somewhere to be returned to, and a person at the other end could look at the seat and know which street on Lorn’s Reach to write to.
Mara counted the second column while Nemi wrote. Sixty-three names under Next flight so far, and Nemi had not finished. Four more flights, at least, at twenty a flight. More, when the hospital’s list came. She did not say the number aloud. She wrote it in the margin of her notebook, under the air figures, and drew a box around it.
They went to the dock. Sera was at the Tern’s airlock with a grease pencil, writing on the steel inner door in large black letters. Mara read them over her shoulder.
20. NOT 21.
“The engine collar complains over that,” Sera said, without turning. “It’s the tired one. I sold the good one with the fittings; the spare’s still in the hold. It’ll take twenty at full weight and hold. It’ll take twenty-one and hold for a while and then decide it doesn’t want to anymore.” She underlined NOT twice. “It’s a grumpy old thing, but it doesn’t lie to me. It tells me when it’s had enough. You listen to it.”
She talked about the collar, Mara noticed, the way she talked about Nemi: with a kind of exasperated respect, as if it were a person with a bad temper who had never once let her down.
Nemi had come out behind them with the loading order copied onto a sheet of paper from her clipboard. She held it out. Sera took it and read it, all the way down, all twenty squares, and then the second column beside it with its long list of names under Next flight.
Her jaw moved.
“Every seat you give a child,” she said, “is a seat we don’t give a shelter couple. There are old people in that hall who’ve been cold for three weeks. Two of them are married forty years. They asked me on the dock this morning whether they could go together.”
“The couple has a name on the list,” Nemi said. “Same as the child does. They’re in the second column. They’re on the next flight.”
“If there’s a next flight.”
“Then you’ll make sure there is.”
Sera looked at her sister. Then at the paper. Then at the airlock door with its grease-pencil numbers.
She did not argue further. Mara watched her decide not to, and understood that it cost her something; that Sera had made a promise on the dock this morning to two old people married forty years, and that the loading order in her hand broke it, and that she would carry that.
Mara took the loading order from Sera’s hand and a roll of tape from the tool bag on the deck, and taped the sheet to the airlock door, beside 20. NOT 21., at eye level, where anyone boarding would see it.
Sera looked at it a moment. Then she reached out and tore off the bottom half.
She did it neatly, along a fold, so that the top half stayed on the door with the twenty seats. She turned the torn piece over. On its back, the blank side, she wrote with the grease pencil, fast, in a pilot’s shorthand Mara could not read: figures, a heading, a time. The flight plan for the gate.
“I need paper,” she said, when she saw Mara looking. “We’re out of paper.”
Mara looked at the half still taped to the door. The twenty seats, with their names. And beside them, running down the edge of the sheet where Sera had torn it, still on the half that stayed: the second column. Next flight. The long list of names Nemi had written under it, one under another, ran down the paper to the tear.
Sera folded the flight plan and put it in her jacket. The half she kept was the plan to the gate. The half she left on the door was the plan to come back.