By dusk the patrol had made its last sweep, a faint grey shape crossing high over the dormitory blocks and dwindling toward the Directorate towers in the west. Sera watched it all the way down. When it was gone she stood up from her crate and said, “Now.”
The yard hands had gone in. Tavin was at the bench under the work lamp, pretending to sort files. Pell had come out of the back room at the sound of the ship’s hydraulics and was standing by the gate post with his hands in his pockets, watching everything.
Mara set the jacks. There were two of them, big screw jacks from the yard’s heavy-lift kit, and she placed them under the hull’s lifting points fore and aft of the repaired claw, so the ship could be raised off the leg and let back down on it. Sera climbed into the cockpit to run the hydraulic ram on the leg, so the coupling would take the load exactly as it would in a landing.
“On my count,” Mara called.
“On your count,” Sera called back, through the open hatch. “Make it a good one.”
Mara wound the jacks up together, a quarter turn each, back and forth between them, until the hull lifted clear and the claw hung free beneath it, its pad a hand’s width off the dirt. She looked at the coupling. The new pliant seam sat straight and clean in the lamp light.
“Down,” she said, and began to unwind.
The hull settled. The pad touched the dirt, took the weight, and the leg compressed, the ram hissing, and at the coupling the pliant seam flexed: a small, visible give, a finger’s width of bend at the joint, exactly where she had put it. The knuckle at the top shifted too, freed of its old plate. The load came down the leg in a long shallow curve instead of a hard straight line.
The graft gave her a single low note, steady, without a stutter.
“One,” Sera said from the cockpit.
Mara wound the jacks up again. The leg extended. The coupling straightened and the seam came back to true. She let it down. It flexed and held.
“Two.”
Up. Down. The ship’s weight was enormous in the jacks; she could feel it in her shoulders, in the small of her back, in the burn along her forearms as she worked the handles. Sera counted every stroke aloud, without hurry, in a voice that was almost bored, and Mara realized after the fourth one that the voice was for her. Something steady to work to. A count someone else would keep for her.
“Five. Six.”
At seven, the hull shifted on the forward jack and the whole ship rocked, and Pell made a small sound by the gate post. Mara stopped. She checked the jack. It had walked a finger’s width on the dirt. She reset it, packed a plate under its foot, and went on.
“Seven again,” Sera said, without comment.
“Eight. Nine.”
On the tenth stroke the coupling flexed and held and came back, exactly as it had on the first. The graft’s note was as clean at the end as at the beginning. Mara stood back from the jacks with her hands on her knees and breathed.
Sera climbed down out of the cockpit and walked around to the claw. She looked at it. She crouched and looked at the coupling, at the seam, at the freed knuckle. She put her hand on the leg and pressed, and it moved a little under her palm, and came back.
“Fine,” she said. “It bends.” She stood up. “Ships bend.”
It was, Mara would learn, the closest thing to praise Sera Dain gave anyone who was not dying.
Tavin had come out from behind his bench to watch the last strokes. He looked at the coupling, nodded at it, and went back to his files.
“So,” Sera said. “What do I owe you?”
Mara told her. It was a fair price, the yard’s ordinary rate for the hours and the parts, with nothing added for the extra trouble of the coupling.
Sera reached into the breast of her jacket, took out a thin leather wallet, opened it, and turned it over. Nothing fell out.
“I have no cash,” she said.
“You said you could pay for some of it.”
“I can.” She put the wallet away and took something else out of an inside pocket: a small chip, the size of a thumbnail, dark grey, with a pale row of contacts along one edge. “Navigation chip. Compact port, good for any of the standard consoles. It has routes on it that aren’t on the public charts. Some of them are old. Some of them are mine.” She held it out. “And a promise. Freight space on my next run, wherever it goes, for whatever you need moved. I’ll carry it.”
“Cash is easier to spend,” Mara said.
“Cash is for people who sleep at home,” Sera said.
Mara looked at the chip. She knew what navigation chips were worth in the abstract: a lot, to the right buyer. She knew none of the right buyers. A chip in the yard was a curiosity; she could sell it to the dock office for a fraction of its worth, if they asked no questions about where it came from. The promise was worth exactly as much as Sera’s word, and she had known Sera for one day.
She took the chip. It was warm from Sera’s pocket.
“I’ll hold the promise,” she said. “Until I need it.”
“Good. Don’t need it too soon.”
Sera sat back down on her crate. The light was going fast now, the sky over the towers fading from red to brown, and the yard’s work lamp threw a long yellow wedge across the lot that ended at the ship’s flank. Mara saw the name for the first time, painted small and neat under the cockpit in faded white letters: TERN.
“Why do you fly freight?” Mara asked.
Sera looked at her. For a while Mara thought she would not answer.
“For money,” Sera said. “Mostly. Scrap runs, parts runs, a little hauling for people who don’t want to stand in the Directorate’s freight queue. I go where the work is.” She was quiet a moment. “I have a sister on Lorn’s Reach. She teaches children there. Lorn’s lamp is failing. You’ve heard that, maybe.”
Mara had heard. Everyone had heard, in the way one heard about distant weather: Lorn was dimming, Lorn’s harvests were short, there were evacuation lists. It was a long way off. It was somebody else’s sky.
“There are evacuation lists,” Sera said. “The Compact makes them. They take people whose work records justify the transport. Engineers. Doctors. Specialists. Teachers don’t rate high on the work records.” Her voice stayed level; it was the same almost-bored voice she had used for the count. “So I fly freight, and I save what I make, and when I have enough, I’ll go and get her myself.”
She did not say her sister’s name. Mara left it unasked.
“Why scrap, though?” Mara said. “Why here? You land a ship like you’ve done it under worse conditions. You check the patrol lanes. You carry a rescue line on your wrist.” She nodded at the coil. “You weren’t always a freight pilot.”
Sera turned the coil on her wrist, one turn, a small gesture.
“I was a rescue pilot,” she said. “Directorate rescue service. I had a commission.” She named no length of time. “My old commander still uses my old rank in the call logs, when my ship comes up on a scan. He thinks it reminds me of something.” She shrugged. “I’ve stopped answering to it.”
“Why did you lose the commission?”
Sera smiled then, a real one, brief and not especially pleasant. “You ask a lot of questions for someone who charges after the work.”
“You didn’t answer.”
“No,” Sera agreed. “I didn’t.” She leaned her head back against the hull and looked at the darkening sky. “Ask me again when you’ve flown with me.”
Mara let it go. She sat down on an upturned bin across from Sera, the chip in her fist, and for a while neither of them said anything. Pell had drifted closer. He was standing a few meters off with his hands in his pockets, looking at the Tern with an expression Mara recognized: the look he got in front of the cutaway picture in the old primer, the look of somebody memorizing a thing so he could build it later.
“Does the Directorate come to the yard much?” Sera asked. “Inspectors. Officers.”
“For the tithe,” Mara said. “Not for the yard. The yard doesn’t have anything they want, except the heating debt.”
Sera looked at her with something like surprise. “That’s the first honest thing anyone’s told me about Cinder since I landed.”
“What did they tell you before?”
“That the lamp is stable and the quotas are fair.” Sera closed her eyes. “Every port says that. Every port I’ve been to in nine years. The lamp is stable and the quotas are fair, until the day the evacuation list goes up.”
Across the yard, Tavin turned down the work lamp. He came out from behind the bench with his coat over his arm and walked toward the gate, and as he passed Mara he paused for just a moment, and she felt something drop into her coat pocket, small and heavy. He kept his eyes elsewhere. He went on to the gate, nodded once at Sera, said “Good night” to Pell, and went out into the street.
She put her hand in her pocket. Two spare pins for the coupling, the right size, hardened. In case.
Sera had seen it. She had her eyes open again.
“Your master?” she said.
“Yes.”
“He doesn’t say much.”
“No.”
“I like him.” Sera stood, stretched, and put her hand on the Tern’s hull, as though to say good night to it too. “I’ll need my bay for two days, starting the night after next. Here, if your yard will let it. I’ll pay for the space when I can.”
“For what?”
Sera looked at her. In the near-dark her face was hard to read.
“For a job,” she said. “I’ll tell you when I know what it needs.” She climbed up into the hatch, then turned, one hand on the frame. “Thank you for the leg, Mara Venn.”
The hatch closed. A light came on in the cockpit, then went off again.
Mara sat on the upturned bin with the chip in one hand and the pins in her pocket and her brother standing beside her in the dark, turning the chip over and over in her fingers, as if its edges could tell her what a pilot wanted with a smith once the leg was holding.