Mara stood over the bin and did not move.
She looked at the crystals in it, dense and dark, more of them than she had cut in a day of shaking on the rail. She put her hand near them, not touching, and listened: the root iron’s deep round note, steady, alive, every one of them. She looked at the lid, at her own marks and below them Sera’s, the hours and the count and the weight and the signature.
Then she looked at the foam pad under the clamp’s back leg.
“You found the rattle,” she said.
“It was a leg,” Sera said. “One leg long. The frame rocked. I padded it.”
“With a splint.”
“With the foam out of a splint. The steel’s still in my kit.” Sera had not moved from the wall. “You’d have found it. You’d have found it after you’d cut another seven crystals and thrown away three.”
Mara let it stand. It was true; she knew her own hands, and how they had been shaking.
