Sera got the housing cover off and looked inside without a word and then put the cover back on, screw by screw, in the same order she had taken them out.
“Well?” Mara said.
“It’s bolted the way I’d bolt it if I wanted it to stay shut,” Sera said. “Which tells me something about whoever built it, and nothing about how to open it.” She stood up and put the screwdriver away. “We pack. Whatever happens with that door, we pack now, so that when it opens we’re through it in one minute and not ten.”
So they packed the harvest beside the locked gate.
They brought the three bins up from the lowest chamber on the lift, one trip, the bins on the lift’s grating between them. CROWN. SEAM. ROOT. Each lid in Mara’s square marker letters. The bins hummed, all three, a low chord in the graft that she had stopped hearing except when she listened for it, the way one stops hearing a clock.
The Tern’s hold was on the other side of the ring, and the ring was shut, so they could not load the hold. Instead they set the bins on the bay deck in a row against the wall, beside the ring, where they would go through first when the ring opened. Mara set them in order: crown at the end nearest the lift, then seam, then root at the end nearest the ring.
