The municipal dormitory office was on the ground floor of the long brick block, at the end of a corridor that smelled of floor soap and boiled cabbage. It had a counter with a brass rail, a wall of pigeonholes, and a clerk who had been sitting behind the counter, as far as Mara could tell, since the Founders left.
She was a small woman with grey hair pinned tight and reading glasses on a cord around her neck. She did not look up when Mara came in. She looked up when Mara said Pell’s name.
“Venn, Pell. Second floor. Bed thirty-one.” The clerk pulled a folder from a drawer without having to search for it. “Under review.”
“I know. I’m here to release it.”
The clerk put on her glasses. She took a printed form from the folder, turned it around on the counter, and slid it across under the brass rail. Mara looked at it. It was a single sheet, close-printed, with a box at the bottom for a signature and another box for a witness.
“Loan paper,” the clerk said. She read the terms aloud in a level voice, the voice of someone who had read them aloud a thousand times and expected to read them a thousand more. “The applicant assumes the cost of the ward’s maintenance for the current period, plus the release fee. Standard rate. Repaid from the applicant’s apprenticeship credit at the yard of record, in monthly portions, until cleared. The bed is released on signature.”
“What’s the release fee?”
The clerk told her. Mara had expected it to be bad. It was worse. She did the arithmetic in her head, standing at the counter, and the number that came out was more than four months of her credit, and the rate on top of it would add another month before it was done.
“Who sets the fee?” she asked.
“The city,” the clerk said, and waited.
Pell was in the corridor behind her, leaning on the wall by the notice board. She could hear him through the open office door, counting under his breath. When she glanced back he was looking down the long hallway toward the dormitory rooms, one hand in his coat pocket, his lips moving.
“How many?” she called.
“Twenty-two doors on this floor,” he said. “Six beds a room is a hundred thirty-two. But there are only a hundred eighteen names on the board. So fourteen beds are empty, or the board is wrong.” He came to the door. “Three boys in my room have no coats. Darian, Lio, and the new one. They sleep in their blankets and go to school in their blankets.”
The clerk kept her eyes on the form.
“Who decides who gets a coat?” Pell asked.
“The warden,” Mara said.
“I haven’t checked that the warden decides.” He said it without heat, as a statement of fact. “She gave me socks once out of a box. So maybe she decides socks. I don’t know who decides coats.”
Mara turned to the clerk. The clerk looked at the form.
There was a pen chained to the counter. Mara picked it up. She read the terms once more, all the way through, slowly, the way Tavin had taught her to read a parts contract. Repaid from the applicant’s apprenticeship credit at the yard of record. That meant Tavin’s yard. That meant the money would come out of the account before she ever saw it, a portion every month, and her forge would go further off by exactly that much.
She signed.
The witness box needed a staff signature. The clerk rang a small bell on the counter, and after a minute the warden came along the corridor with her steaming cup, signed the box without reading it, and looked at Pell.
“Bed’s released in the morning,” she said. “You’ll want your things out before the next intake.”
“I’ll move my bedroll tonight,” Pell said. “And the ship.”
“What ship?”
He took it out of his pocket and showed her: the wire ship from the yard shelf, which he had taken back the day before, its spoon-handle fins catching the corridor light. The warden looked at it for a moment with an expression Mara could not read. Then she said, “Don’t drop it on the stairs,” and went back to her office.
Pell put the ship away. He looked at the loan paper on the counter, at Mara’s signature, at the box below it.
“How much was it?”
“Enough.”
“That’s not a number.”
“It’s the one you’re getting today.”
He looked at her for a moment longer, then nodded as though filing it somewhere, and went upstairs to get his bedroll.
She walked him back to the yard as the light went red over the towers. He carried the bedroll on his shoulder and a canvas bag in one hand; everything he owned fit in the two. He talked little. At the pump-house corner he stopped and looked up at the window of the flat where they had lived before, now dark, with someone else’s curtains, and then he walked on without saying anything, and she matched his step and kept her own mouth shut.
Tavin was at the stove when they came in. The yard’s kitchen was a low room behind the office with a black iron range, a long table scarred with knife marks, and a single lamp hung from a hook over the middle. He looked at Pell’s bedroll and at the bag, and then at Mara.
“He’s out,” she said. “The bed’s released.”
Tavin grunted. He took a third bowl from the shelf and set it at the end of the table.
That was all. No question about the cost. No question about where Pell would sleep, though there was only one spare room, the cold one at the back that held the broken bellows and a crate of old files. Mara knew how it would go. Tavin would say nothing. He would put Pell’s food on the table every night and Pell’s coal on the stove, and at the end of the month there would be a new figure on the slate in the office, under the heating debt, in Tavin’s square hand, and it would not have Pell’s name on it. It would say board or kitchen or simply be added to the column.
She wanted to say something about it. Nothing came.
They ate. Tavin had made a stew of barley and root and some kind of smoked meat, and he had salted it too heavily, as he always did, and Pell ate two bowls as if he had not eaten in a week, which was nearly true. Arlo came in from the bunk room partway through and sat and ate with them. Fenno was never there; he went home to his mother’s on market nights.
When the bowls were empty and Pell had gone to look at the back room, Mara stayed at the table.
“Tavin.”
He was wiping the ladle. “Mm.”
“The trunk.”
He did not stop wiping. But he slowed.
“My mother kept a trunk. A travel trunk, steel corners. She had it when she came home from her last trip. I remember it in the hall at the old flat. After the fire it wasn’t there.” She kept her voice level. “People said you took it. For the tools. Unpaid tools.”
“We agreed about her,” Tavin said.
“You agreed,” Mara said. “I didn’t.”
She had never said it so plainly. She had been sixteen when she came to the yard, and the agreement, whatever it was, had been made over her head between Tavin and the city and perhaps her mother’s ghost, and she had been given the result: an apprenticeship, a room, a locked drawer, a silence. For three years she had circled it. Tonight, with the loan paper’s terms still running in her head and Pell’s bedroll in the hall, she found she was done circling.
Tavin hung the ladle on its hook. He took the bread from the board, cut a heel off it, and set it in front of her.
“Eat your bread,” he said.
She looked at the bread. She looked at him. He had turned back to the range and was banking the coals for the night, his broad back to her, his sleeves still rolled. He stayed that way.
She left the bread untouched. Nor did she leave the table. After a while Pell came back and asked whether he could have the lamp in the back room, the small one from the shelf, because the back room had no window and he wanted to work on his models at night.
Mara watched Tavin’s back. It stayed turned.
“Yes,” Mara said. “Take the table lamp.”
Pell took it. She heard him in the back room, moving the crate of files, unrolling the bedroll on the floor beside the broken bellows. She heard him set something down carefully, a small metal clink, and she knew without looking that the wire ship was under the lamp now, its fins tilted in the light.
Later, in her own room above the office, she sat on her bed with her notebook open to the page where she kept her forge savings. She kept them in pencil, a running total, with each month’s credit added at the bottom and each purchase taken off. She looked at the figure she had written at the start of the week.
She took the loan off it. She did the arithmetic carefully, twice, and wrote the new total below the old one. Then she looked at it. Her own forge had moved one loan further away. The room she had meant to rent for Pell, the narrow one over the bakery on Cutter Row, had moved further away too, though Pell was out of the dormitory now and sleeping in a yard back room with a broken bellows, which was not what she had planned and was perhaps better than what she had planned.
The figure was wrong, she realized. She had taken off the release fee and the first period of maintenance, but not the first repayment, which would come out at the end of the month with the rate added. She would have to subtract it again.
She looked at the pencil total for a long time. She left it wrong, there on the page, a small lie in her own hand, until she knew what the yard could carry and what Tavin would not say.