Before she touched the valve, she wanted the keeper to know who she was.
She could not have said why it mattered. It was a voice in a ceiling. It forgot things. But it had asked what she had, and she had told it, and it had called her honest, and she found she wanted to be honest about more than her hands. She wanted it to know the rest.
She stood up from the valve and walked back along the red paint to the middle of the chamber, under the ceiling grille.
“Orison.”
“Yes.”
“The strip I brought. The one in the gate. It has a mark on it.” She took off her glove and held up her bare hand, though there was nothing in it; she did it without thinking, as if she were showing the keeper the mark itself. “A maker’s mark. A small hammer inside a circle. With a date beside it. The date is this year. Three years after my mother was supposed to have died.”
The grille was silent.
Then the static came, a burst this time instead of the soft breath-like hiss it had made before, sharp and loud, a crackling roar that filled the chamber and made Mara flinch and Sera’s hand go to the line. It lasted perhaps two seconds. It cut off as suddenly as it had begun.
“I apologize,” Orison said. Its voice sounded different. Slower. “I was searching. It is a large record.”
“Did you find it?”
“I found the mark.” A pause. “The mark is valid. It is registered to a smith. It is in the forge’s record of smiths whose work the forge has accepted.” Another pause. “Your permission is not valid. You are not that smith.”
“No,” Mara said. “I’m her daughter.”
“I have no record of a daughter.”
“I know. I’m telling you.”
The grille was quiet for a while. When Orison spoke again, it spoke carefully, like a clerk reading a form aloud to be sure it had been filled in right.
“I am entering you in my own record,” it said. “As an unlicensed candidate. A person without permission who has presented a valid mark and asked to work. I have a category for that. I do not remember using it before.”
“Write my name exactly,” Mara said. “Mara Venn. V-E-N-N.”
“I have written it.”
“Is it spelled right?”
“Your name is spelled correctly,” Orison said. Then, after a pause, in a tone of faint bewilderment: “I have forgotten who spelled it. I believe it was you. I believe it was a moment ago. I am going to write down that it was you, so that I do not have to remember.”
Mara stood under the grille and felt something unexpected in her chest. Something gentler than laughter. The keeper was doing what she did, what she had done in the shed with her two-column notebook and in the records hall with the register’s margins: writing things down so that it never had to trust its own memory. It had a third column too, she thought. It just had no name for it yet.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Do not thank me,” Orison said. “The forge requires that you repair the valve before it will trust you near tools you cannot name. That has not changed. The mark tells me who made you. It does not tell me what you can do.”
Sera had lifted her wrist and was looking at the scratched face of her rescue-service watch through the visor. She did it without comment, but Mara saw her do it, and saw her lips move as she counted something.
“How long?” Mara asked.
“Two hours and a quarter since we left the ring.” Sera lowered her wrist. “Eight and a half since we left the dock. Nemi has the school on one warm room and thirty hours of fuel, less the eight and a half.”
Mara heard what she was not saying. Every hour in this chamber was an hour off the school’s thirty. Every hour the Tern sat docked at the gate was an hour it was not flying children. Sera had given her one flight, and the flight had become a lift into a sun, and the lift had become a locked room and a leaking valve and a voice that could not remember its own rules.
“If the valve takes too long,” Mara said, “say so. And we’ll go.”
“I’ll say so.” Sera held her eyes. “I’m not saying so yet.”
That was all. But Mara understood that it was a gift, and that Sera was counting the cost of it in children, and that she would keep counting it the whole time they were down here, and would tell Mara the number whenever Mara asked, and would not pretend it was smaller than it was.
Mara looked down the red paint at the valve with its frost.
The keeper was right. She had wanted, for a moment, when the static roared and Orison said the mark is valid, for that to be enough. She had wanted the forge to look at her mother’s mark on the strip and open every door. It had not. It had looked at the mark and said: you are not that smith. And it was right. A maker’s mark proved who had made a thing. It proved nothing about whether the thing could hold a load.
She had spent three years in a yard where that was the first rule. Clean metal lies about its seams. A mark on a plate told you whose shop had made it, not whether the weld under it was sound. Nobody in the yard trusted the mark. You drew the file.
So the keeper’s limit was a clean line. She could work inside it. It told her exactly where she stood: candidate, unlicensed, permitted the lowest chamber and a leaking valve and nothing else until she showed what her hands could do. She found she did not mind. She found, in fact, that she preferred it. A line drawn plainly was a line she could see.
“What tools do you have?” Orison asked. “The forge will want to know. I will want to know. So I can write them down.”
Mara listed them. She had laid them out on the grating by the valve when she knelt, out of habit, the way Tavin laid out his tools before a job so a shaking hand could find them. She named each one aloud.
“A pressure gauge. Brass, standard Compact pattern, the needle reads to two hundred. A wrench. Adjustable, brass knurl, torque scale stamped on the handle.” Tavin’s own, from the crate; she had brought it down in her suit’s thigh pocket. “A rag. For wiping the seat. And my notebook.”
“Those are tools you can name,” Orison said. “I have written them down.”
Sera had been standing at the door the whole time, silent, the line in her fist. Now she said, through her helmet’s speaker, in a flat voice that carried across the small cold room:
“It has a mark and we have a leak.” She jerked her chin at the valve. “Pick the leak.”
Mara almost smiled.
“Orison,” she said, “which tool should I use first?”
“I do not know,” Orison said. “I am sorry. I have no hands. I have never used any of them.” A pause. “Which tool will you use first?”
“The gauge,” Mara said.
She walked down the red paint to the valve and knelt in front of it again. The frost had spread while she talked; it had crept another finger’s width across the pipe, white and feathered, and it had begun to climb the collar. The hiss was steady. The cold coming off the joint made the air in front of her visor shimmer.
She left the collar alone, and the wheel. She took the gauge and found the test port on the valve’s body, a small threaded nipple below the collar, capped, and unscrewed the cap with her bare fingers, which burned with the cold, and threaded the gauge onto the port.
The needle swung up, shivered, settled.
She kept her eyes off the dial and looked up at the ceiling.
“Orison,” she said. “Before I turn anything. What’s your reading? The last pressure you have for this valve. Whatever’s in your record.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to know if my gauge agrees with you,” Mara said. “If it does, then we’re both measuring the same thing. If it doesn’t, then one of us is wrong, and I want to know which before I put a wrench on a pipe full of cold from the dark side of a sun.”
The grille was silent.
Mara waited. Her bare fingers, where she had touched the cap, were beginning to ache with the cold. She did not put the glove back on.
“No visitor has ever asked me for my reading before they took their own,” Orison said at last. “I am going to write that down too.”