The guest room was a small square chamber off the control room’s corridor, with a table and two chairs and a cot folded against one wall, and a vent in the ceiling that breathed faintly warm air. Orison said it had been built for visiting smiths. For inspectors, sometimes, it added. I believe more inspectors than smiths.
Caldris sat on one side of the table. Mara sat on the other. Sera stood by the door with her back to the wall. A guard stood outside it. Lisan had stayed in the corridor; Mara could see the edge of his shoulder through the open door, and the long case leaning against the wall beside him.
Caldris took a sheet of paper from inside her coat, real paper this time, folded in thirds, heavy and cream-colored, with the Compact’s star circle embossed at the top. She unfolded it and smoothed it flat on the table and turned it around so that Mara could read it.
“A proposal,” she said.
Mara read it.
It was a contract, like Halvek’s, but better made. The language was cleaner. The clauses were shorter. It offered a laboratory: a Compact facility on Meridian, with proper instruments, a full stock of metals, a trained crew, cradles that could be warmed, records that did not forget. It offered legal protection: Mara’s unauthorized work at Lorn would be retroactively licensed, and she would be immune from any charge arising from it, under a supervision order issued by the Compact. And…
