“You did,” Mara said to the grille. “In the bay. When we came through the ring.”
“Ah.” A pause. Static, soft, like breath. “Then I apologize twice. Once for asking, and once for forgetting that I asked.” Another pause. “I am Orison. I keep the forge. I believe I keep the forge. There is no one else here, so if I do not, no one does.”
The voice was thin and old and very polite. It sounded, Mara thought, like a clerk in a records hall who has been alone with the files for too long and has started talking to them.
“I am required to request an inspection code,” Orison went on. “All visitors to the forge must present a valid inspection code.” The grille crackled. “I believe that code was valid. The one I was about to describe to you. I believe that was yesterday. Or some time ago. I have a record that codes expire. I do not have a record of which ones have.”
Sera, beside Mara, made a small sound inside her helmet that might have been a laugh.
“We don’t have a code,” Mara said.
“No. I did not think you did. Visitors with codes do not usually arrive through the waste disguise.” The grille clicked. “What do you have?”
Mara thought about it. She thought about lying, about saying we’re from the Compact or we’re an inspection crew, and remembered the five bright marks on the heater seal at the school and the man in the grey uniform saying stand back, and did not.
“A strip of seam iron,” she said. “It was in the slot at the gate. It’s still there, I think. Three notebooks, my mother’s, about the forge, or about something like it. A pressure gauge.” She touched the brass dial hanging from her belt; she had brought the yard’s spare, the one from the bench, on a lanyard. “And my hands.”
There was a long silence. The static rose and fell.
“That is not a credential,” Orison said at last.
“I know.”
“It is honest, however,” Orison said. “Which is rarer. I have a record of a great many credentials. I have very few records of honesty.” The grille crackled. “I will open the lowest chamber. Only the lowest. The rest of the forge remains closed to an uncredentialed visitor. I am sorry for it. That is the rule, and I believe it is still the rule, and I would rather follow a rule I am unsure of than break one I have forgotten the reason for.”
The door beside the grille slid open.
The chamber behind it was not large. A room perhaps the size of Tavin’s kitchen, with a floor of grated steel, blackened, as though something had once burned on it or under it, and walls lined with pipes. Cold pipes. Mara could feel their cold from the doorway, through the suit, on her face behind the visor. They ran along the walls in thick bundles, grey and white, some as thick as her waist, some as thin as her finger, and they disappeared through the ceiling and the floor and into the walls at the room’s far end, where there was another door, closed.
There was a smell, faint, through the suit’s filters, that she had to breathe twice to be sure of. Frost. Cold metal. Something sharp and clean, like the air after lightning.
Mara hesitated at the threshold. The floor beyond the door was not uniform: most of the grating was plain black, scorched, but down its middle ran a strip of red paint, faded, chipped, a hand’s width wide, the same red as on the lift platform. Her mother’s red. It ran from the doorway straight across the chamber to the far wall, and branched there, one arm to the closed door, one to a bench along the side wall, one to a valve low down beside the door. The rest of the floor was bare.
Mara stepped in, on the red strip of paint that ran down the center of the grating. Sera stepped in behind her, the line taut between them.
“The rest of the forge,” Mara said. “Why is it closed?”
“Because you have no code.”
“I mean the reason. The reason for the rule.”
The grille in this room was in the ceiling. It crackled.
“I do not know,” Orison said. “I am sorry. I have no record of why the cold chamber is sealed.” A pause. “I have a record that I should have one.”
Mara stood on the red paint and looked up at the grille.
“Your first test,” Orison went on, in a slightly brisker tone, as though relieved to have something it was sure of, “is in this room. There is a valve. On the far wall, low, beside the closed door. It is leaking. It has been leaking for some time. I have been unable to repair it, as I have no hands.” The grille clicked. “The forge requires that you repair it. With tools you can name. Before it will trust you near tools you cannot.”
“Tools I can name,” Mara said.
“The forge has many tools. Some of them are dangerous. Some of them I do not remember the names of myself. A visitor who cannot repair a leaking valve with a wrench and a rag should not be near the others.” The voice softened. “That is my understanding of the rule. I believe it is a sensible rule. I am not certain I made it.”
Sera folded her arms. It was awkward in the suit; the elbows were stiff and fought her. She managed it anyway, and stood on the red paint with her arms crossed and looked up at the grille in the ceiling.
“I like the keeper already,” she said.
Mara looked at her.
“It knows it doesn’t know things,” Sera said. “And it says so. Do you know how rare that is? In rescue service, the officers who got people killed were always the ones who knew everything.”
“It apologizes the way a clerk does,” Mara said, “when the form is lost.”
“Exactly,” Sera said. “And then it goes and looks for the form.”
Mara walked down the red paint to the far wall.
The valve was where Orison had said, low on the wall beside the closed door, at the end of a thick grey pipe that came out of the floor and went into the wall. A heavy body of pale alloy, a collar around its throat, a wheel on top. It was ordinary. That was the first thing she noticed. In this place of rivers of light and voices in the bone, it was a valve. She had seen a thousand like it in the yard. Bigger, perhaps, and made of a metal she did not recognize, but a valve: body, seat, collar, stem, wheel.
And it was leaking. She could hear it before she reached it, a thin high hiss, and she could see it when she crouched: a white crust around the collar, frost, growing out from the joint across the pipe’s surface in fine feathery ridges, the way frost grows on a window. The cold was coming out of the joint. Whatever this pipe carried, it was colder than anything she had ever touched, and it was escaping.
She put out her gloved hand toward the collar and stopped.
“Orison,” she said. “What’s in this pipe?”
“Cold,” Orison said. “From the shadow chamber. I believe that is what it is called. The cold is drawn from the lamp’s shadow, its dark side, and carried here for the quench.” A pause. “I am not certain of the size of the valve. I had a record of it. I believe the record was on a page that is no longer in my memory.”
“That’s all right,” Mara said. “I can measure it.”
“Do not thank me yet,” Orison said. “I may have forgotten other things about it too.”
Mara looked at the valve, the frost, the collar. Then she looked back down the red paint at Sera, standing at the door with her arms folded and the line in her fist.
“It’s in the shadow chamber,” Mara said. “The cold. That’s what it carries.”
“Then mind your fingers,” Sera said.
Mara unclipped the gauge from her belt and held it in her hand, keeping it off the metal for now. She looked at the frost creeping across the pipe, and at the collar under it, and she thought of Tavin’s yard, the cold tray, the chalk letters on the wall. LISTEN. That was first. Before anything.
She had not listened yet. She had looked, and asked, and walked on the red paint, and none of that was listening. She knelt on the red paint in front of a leaking valve at the bottom of a dying sun, with a forgetful voice in the ceiling and a rescue pilot at the door, and she began to listen.