Sera did not trust the needle.
She had watched it rest at zero on the steel block, and she had watched Mara write zero at the top of the dial log with something close to satisfaction, and she had said nothing. Then Mara had sat down on a crate by the wall to rest her arms for ten minutes before going out to the shell, and closed her eyes, and in less than one of those ten minutes she had been asleep, one arm thrown over her face, breathing slow and deep.
Sera let her sleep.
She went to the bench and stood over the clamp and looked at the needle. It sat at zero. She breathed out, slowly, toward the dial.
The needle twitched.
Barely, but it moved. She held her breath, and it settled. She breathed again, out, gently, and it twitched again.
“A needle that jumps when you breathe,” she said under her breath, “is lying to you.”
She had spent nine years in the rescue service learning not to trust instruments that moved for no reason. A pressure gauge that swung when the ship banked. A fuel readout that dropped when the heater came on. An air monitor that read safe in a mine until you put it near a man who was choking. Every one of those instruments had been telling the truth about something; it just was not the thing you had asked it about. The trick was to find out what it was…
