Ashes on the Edge of Nothing

The pod was rated for two adults, lying down, for fourteen days.

Leon measured it on the second day because his hands needed something to do. Two point one metres from the hatch seal to the coolant bulkhead. One point four across. Ninety centimetres at the crown, which meant he could sit up if he tipped his head, and could not otherwise. Two berths side by side with a hand's width between them. A recycler under the floor. A ration locker with a broken latch that he learned to open with his thumbnail.

Twenty-eight person-days of food in the locker.

They were in there thirty-five days.

Point four, he thought, the first time he ran it. We are at point four of what we need. He ran it again with the water and it came out worse. He ran it with the medication and stopped running things for a while.

The smell he would remember was not the recycler, though the recycler was the worse smell — ammonia and hot dust with a wet-metal note under it, and by the third week the smell of the two of them, which he stopped noticing and then noticed again every time he woke. What he remembered was the ration paste. It heated on a foil plate and smelled like burnt sugar. Twelve hundred kilojoules a sachet. It tasted of nothing at all, which felt like a decision someone had made in a room, on purpose, years ago.

The recycler pump ran a sixty-second cycle. Click, forty-one seconds of running, click, nineteen seconds of nothing. On the fourth day he multiplied it out and got fifty thousand four hundred cycles for five weeks, and told himself he would not count them.

He counted them. Involuntarily. The way he did everything.

"You're at two-thirds," Eliana said.

Second week. She had her knees drawn up under the cardigan and the cardigan buttoned to the throat, because the pod ran at nine degrees and would not be argued with.

"I'm at three-quarters."

"You're at two-thirds. I watched you fold the sachet." She did not look at him while she said it, which was how he knew she had been saving it. "I can't run. I can still count."

"It's a rounding difference."

"It's four hundred kilojoules a day, over eleven days, which is four and a bit sachets, which is a day and a half of you." Her head rolled towards him. Pale violet, gone nearly grey in the emergency amber. "Don't make me do the arithmetic out loud. It's humiliating for both of us. You're supposed to be the one who does it and I'm supposed to be the one who's decorative."

"You are extremely decorative."

"I'm filthy."

"You're decorative and filthy. The combination is very fashionable this season." He got the plate off the heater with two fingers, because the rim held heat and there was no cloth. "Eat."

"I'd like to lodge a complaint."

"Complaints go to the steward."

"You're the steward."

"Then you'll want to be careful how you phrase it."

She lifted her thumb. Their mother's signet turned on it the way it always did, the sunburst rolling round to sit on the back of her hand where nobody could see it. "There's one wipe. Singular. I have been sharing one wipe with you for eleven days—"

"Nine."

"—for eleven days, and I want it on the record that I've been gracious about it."

It cost him something to do the next part. He was aware of the cost the way you are aware of a coin leaving your hand.

"When you own clothes with a fastening more complicated than a button," he said, "we'll consider processing your complaints as an adult."

"I have buttons."

"You have four buttons and one of them is a spare."

"That's a reserve button. That's forward planning." She was smiling. She looked like a bird that had been left out in the weather. "Aristocrats have reserve buttons. It's practically the whole institution."

He made himself smile back. It came out fine. He had checked, on the third day, in the black of the hatch glass, that it came out fine.

They talked about stations. That was the game that survived. She made him list the stops on the Aurelion orbital loop in order, then in reverse, then in order skipping every third, and when she caught him out — she never caught him out — she was allowed to sleep facing the warm wall. They talked about food constantly and specifically. The four kinds of bread at the long table. The pear thing with the burnt top. Whether the kitchen had ever once, in a thousand years, produced anything with fish in it.

They talked about whether Pip was male.

"He's a he."

"It's a class-four medical unit."

"He's a he, and he snores."

"That's a fan bearing."

"He snores," she said, "through a fan bearing. Like a gentleman."

On day sixteen she said, "The pear thing. She used to—" and stopped, with the word half out, and turned her face to the wall and asked him for the outbound loop from Ossary.

He gave her the outbound loop from Ossary.

Thirty-five days and neither of them said either name. Not the mother, not the father. It was not a rule. Nobody proposed it. They had simply drawn the line in the same place without discussing it, which was, he thought, the only inheritance that had come through the fire intact.

Pip logged her vitals every ninety minutes, because that was what Pip was for.

The drone sat in the netting above her head with its ducted fans idle, a white palm-sized thing that sounded like a wasp in a jar when it moved, and it dimmed its indicators down to almost nothing when she slept so as not to wake her. Leon had not asked it to do that. It had come like that from the factory, or it had come like that from her. He was never sure which.

Every morning it offered him the log. It had nothing else to offer. A medical drone in a steel box with no clinic to call.

Day four: resting pulse 104. Day eleven: 109. Day nineteen: 112. Day twenty-six: 118, with an amber flag on waking oxygen saturation.

He had no scale, so he made one. A strip of packing tape off the survival kit. He marked her wrist circumference on it with a stylus while she slept, and dated the mark, and did it once a week.

Day one, one hundred and thirty-two millimetres.

Day twenty-eight, one hundred and twenty-six.

He folded the tape and put it in the seam pocket of his jacket. It stayed there fourteen months.

The Tessamine cassette in Pip's belly held nine doses. A dose was a day. It had been designed by people who assumed that when you ran low you walked into a clinic and were handed more, which was a thing that had been true for a thousand and six years.

He cut it to two-thirds on day three. To a half on day nine. To a third on day fifteen, which is not a therapeutic dose, which is a word for a placebo with side effects, and which turned nine days into twenty-seven.

On day twenty-eight the cassette ran empty and reported it in a small polite tone.

Seven days left.

She stopped sitting up on the fourth of them. On the sixth, at 0300 by pod clock, Pip sang into a space of two and a half cubic metres — three rising tones, a pause, three rising tones.

Leon woke already calculating. There was no rate. There was no number in it anywhere.

He got her head up and put water on her fingertip by fingertip for forty minutes. She came back.

"Sorry."

"Don't."

"The wipe," she said, and went out again.

He laughed once, with his forehead on the coolant bulkhead. The recycler clicked. Ran forty-one seconds. Clicked.

On day thirty-five the pod found a planet.

It did not land. It was not a landing craft. It was a survival capsule designed to shed velocity, deploy a drogue, put a crush pad between two people and a surface, and then broadcast on emergency band for up to nine days while somebody civilised came and collected it. Everything after atmospheric interface was, in the design language, retrieval-dependent.

Nobody was coming to retrieve it.

The hull heated. There was no ablative layer, only refractory foam and the promise of a shallow angle, and the shallow angle had been computed against an atmospheric profile documented two centuries ago by a survey that had also got the axial period wrong. At forty kilometres the foam began to leave the nose in strips he could hear going. The interior went from nine degrees to thirty-one in under two minutes. The coolant bulkhead started to knock, twice a second, like a man testing a wall.

He got her out of the berth and onto his chest and dragged the webbing across both of them. Four straps rated for one occupant each. He cinched them until it hurt.

The drogue fired at eight kilometres and tore at seven point six.

The pod began to spin.

He remembered noise. Gravel in a drum. Then a long shriek from behind his head that stopped being a sound and became a smell. The spin was around the long axis, which was the survivable one, and he knew that, and he said it into her hair, and there is no evidence she heard him.

The backup canopy caught at two point one kilometres and held.

They came down at somewhere between eleven and fourteen metres per second, at an angle, on slag.

The crush pad did its job. It was the only component in the machine that did its job that day. It compressed ninety millimetres and turned the rest of the energy into heat and permanent deformation, and the two people inside it lived, and the pod broke its back on a ridge of vitrified tailings, rolled twice, and stopped on its side.

Leon's left hand was between Eliana's skull and the frame of the berth.

He felt the bones go. Third and fourth metacarpals. A bright clean crack he heard through his arm and not his ears. He knew what it was immediately, because at nineteen he had read an orthopaedic atlas in a waiting room out of boredom and had never been able to put anything down since.

He did not treat it for a week. There was nothing to treat it with. After two days it settled into a fact rather than an event. He learned to hold things with his thumb and little finger. It healed crooked and stayed crooked, and fourteen months later Garren Doss would look at that hand across a workbench and say nothing about it at all.

The hatch took eleven minutes.

Then air. Moving, cold, tasting of iron filings with something sweet under it, like a hot bearing. He got his head out into it and breathed until his vision cleared, and looked at where they were.

Grey. A plain of black and grey slag under a sky the colour of an old nail. No sun anywhere and light everywhere, flat, shadowless, dim — the light of the wrong end of a long afternoon. Heaps. Kilometres of heaps, some of them steaming. Steady wind from the left with grit in it.

The beacon had a settlement at twelve point one kilometres, bearing 038. Population estimate eleven thousand. Designation NINEPENNY. Concord administrative status: lapsed.

He looked at the twelve point one and did the only arithmetic available to him.

Eliana could not walk two hundred metres. That was a measured figure, not an estimate. Ten running steps greyed her vision; two hundred metres of level ground on a good day put her on the floor with her head between her knees for a quarter of an hour. This was not a good day. This was day thirty-five at point four rations and day seven with no Tessamine at all.

So he would carry her.

Thirty kilos of sister. One point one of drone. Four litres of water in two bladders, four kilos. Total load thirty-five point one, on a frame that had weighed eighty-one kilos in the spring and now weighed something he did not want to put a number on.

Stride length loaded, six hundred and twenty millimetres. Twelve thousand one hundred metres. Nineteen thousand five hundred and thirty-two steps.

That was the whole of it. That was the entire content of Leon Zadkiel's mind at the bottom of his life. Nineteen thousand five hundred and thirty-two.

He broke it into blocks of four hundred. Forty-eight blocks and change. Twenty breaths of standing rest between blocks, standing, because inside the first kilometre he had worked out that if he sat he would need help getting up and there was nobody within twelve kilometres to give it. He breathed in on two steps and out on three. In on two and out on two put a stitch under his ribs at around step nine hundred.

The ground rose one in twenty-two for four kilometres. He took the grade off the horizon by eye, checked it against the burn in his calves, and revised it to one in nineteen. Then it fell, which was worse, because downhill on slag with a load is a series of small controlled failures and his left hand could not catch anything.

Block eleven. Block twelve. Her breath on the back of his neck, too fast, too shallow, then absent, then back.

"Talk," he said.

"'m talking."

"Stations. Aurelion loop. Outbound."

"Ossary. Bright—" four steps "—Brightwater. Hollowfield."

"Wrong order."

"'s not."

"You've put Hollowfield before the junction."

"Prove it," she said into his collar, and he did, for a hundred and forty steps, and by the end of it she was asleep and he counted alone.

At block twenty-nine he stopped converting distance and started converting cost. Two thousand joules a step, loaded, on grade. Thirty-nine megajoules. Nine thousand three hundred kilocalories. I have eaten eleven hundred and fifty in two days.

He put the thought down the way you put down something hot, and went back to counting steps, because a step is a number you can pay.

The last three kilometres he did not remember well. A rusted conveyor gantry with a nest in it, and being obscurely offended that there were birds. A marker post with a stencilled number he could not make mean anything. And Pip, at some point, flying ahead of him at knee height for a while, then coming back and holding station off his shoulder, which was not a behaviour anyone had written into it.

Ninepenny was not a town. It was a decision somebody had made to stop moving.

Prefab housing in rows, forty units to a row, ribbed grey composite gone brown at the seams. Cable strung between them at head height. A water tower with a patch welded over a patch. A shrine at the crossroads built for no god in particular and looking it. A bar with its door open. A clinic with a light on. And past that, four rows of stalls under salvaged solar sheet with the photovoltaic film peeled off in strips, so the light came down in bands and the bands moved when the sheet lifted in the wind.

The market was the thing he could not process.

He had been raised at Lumengarde. At seven years old he had walked down a hall whose floor was a map of the Reach in inlaid stone, and the stone was polished nightly by machines with a dedicated power feed. He had eaten oranges out of season for twenty-four years without once wondering how they got there.

Here a woman sold three kinds of root vegetable off a door laid across two drums.

He stood at the head of the row with his sister on his back and his hand broken and his boots packed with slag dust, and he waited, without knowing that he was waiting, for something to happen. For someone to come. For the thing that had happened his entire life, which was that when a Zadkiel arrived somewhere, the somewhere reorganised itself around him.

Nobody looked up.

A man went past with a sack and dipped his own shoulder to avoid Leon's. Two women argued about a hose fitting and one of them won. A child ran the length of the row dragging a strip of ducting and nobody stopped him. Behind the stalls a compressor started, ran badly for eight seconds, and quit, and three separate people said the same word at the same time.

On his back was a face that four hundred million people had seen. The once-in-ten-thousand-years flower, unconscious, mouth open, dust in the roots of white hair, in a cardigan that had been white for the first eleven days of a five-week drift.

In his own skull was every equation he had ever read, in order, retrievable, and the access keys to a weapon buried under an observatory on a dead world.

The market had turnips.

He watched a man buy two loaves and count out six-tenths of a mark in worn coin, and that was how Leon learned the price of bread.

"Move or buy," said the woman behind the door-on-drums. Not unkindly. She had a queue.

He moved.

Four stalls down a man sat behind a tray of connectors and scrap under a strip of hide, and Leon put his right hand flat on the tray, ring up.

"Aureate Academy," he said. "First in year. The enamel's fired, not printed."

The man turned it with one finger without taking it off the hand. He had the eyes of somebody who had been offered a great many things by people in trouble and had learned to look at the thing and not the trouble.

"Eighteen."

"It's gold."

"It's gold on this side of the field and nothing on the other. Nobody here wants a school." He sat back. "Eighteen, and I'm the only tray in Ninepenny that'd give you twelve."

"No."

"Then it's a nice ring," the man said, and went back to sorting connectors, and that was the whole of it.

It went two systems over in week two, through a broker with a bad cough who bought things from people unable to argue, and it made two hundred and forty marks. Eight weeks. On the day, standing in front of that tray, Leon did not know any of that. He only knew that eighteen was wrong, and that being right about it was worth nothing to him at all.

The clinic was one room, a curtain, and a queue of six.

He reached the desk after fifty minutes. The clerk was maybe thirty, dark under the eyes, working a datasheet with a cracked corner and a pen on a string. Through the gap in the curtain he could see an autoclave two generations out of date and a grey-blonde woman with her sleeves rolled up doing something to a man's forearm that the man did not enjoy.

"I need Tessamine," Leon said. "It's a stabiliser, it's for—"

"I know what it is." She was already tapping. "Chit."

"I don't have a chit."

"Off-world's fine, I can run it against the Concord register—"

"I don't have a chit. I don't have papers. We came down in the slag field this morning. There was a pod."

She looked up then. Took in the state of him. Went back to the sheet.

Something in the way she went back to the sheet was the worst thing that had happened to him since the capsule glass.

"Thirty-one marks a week," she said. "Cash. We don't hold accounts, and I can't open one for you, because I'm not allowed to and because the last four people who asked me that are also not paying."

"I have no marks."

"Then I can't sell you Tessamine."

"She is twenty-one," Leon said. "Verrine decay. Seven days with no stabiliser, and two weeks at a third dose before that. Resting pulse a hundred and eighteen. Do you understand what those two facts are when you put them next to each other?"

"Thirty-one marks a week. Cash."

And he heard himself go precise.

That was the tell. He knew it was the tell and he could not stop it: the voice dropping, the consonants coming out clean, the Lumengarde in it rising through the dust like a watermark.

"Then let me be exact about what's happening here," he said. "You are standing in a building with a working dispensary, and you are going to send a girl who weighs thirty kilograms back out that door because I cannot produce a token. So give me a number. How many people die in this room every month so that the ledger stays tidy?"

The clerk did not flinch. She had been shouted at by better.

"Four a month in the mine," she said. "Eleven in the town. And nobody in this building enjoys anything."

She wrote on the corner of a scrap, tore it, pushed it across. TESSAMINE — 31/wk — CASH, in the handwriting of someone who had written it a great many times.

Then she said, "The Bellows takes men with no papers. Nine hours, four marks, they pay at the gate. Go before second shift or you'll wait a day."

He stood there with the paper in his good hand.

Thank her. He could feel the shape of it, and under it the shape of the other thing, the apology, three words and the right tone, and he had been trained in exactly that since infancy — the gracious retraction, the small bow, the disarming line.

But he was going to come back to this desk tomorrow. And the day after. And every week for as long as either of them lived, with nothing in his hands, to ask again. A man who apologises has agreed that he was wrong, and a man who was wrong is easier to refuse the second time.

So he did arithmetic on it. He stood in a queue of six and did arithmetic on saying thank you.

"Next," the clerk said.

He put the paper in his pocket and walked out and said nothing, and that was the first thing he did on Veridus-9 that he was ashamed of. It took eleven days to stop being the worst one.

The wind got up after dark, if you could call it dark. The sky went from nail to charcoal and stopped there. He had already pulled a sixty-one-hour day out of the beacon data and had not worked out how to feel about it.

He found a doorway on the lee side of a shuttered fabricator, two streets back from the market. A recess of about a metre. Concrete lip still holding a little of the day's heat. He got her down off his back, got his jacket off, got it round her, and sat with his shoulder against the door and her weight on his chest. Pip settled in the corner of the recess and turned its lights down to almost nothing.

Grit ran along the ground past their boots in little pours, the way sand goes out of a torn bag.

She came up slowly. He knew she was awake because her hand found his sleeve.

"Where."

"Ninepenny. Twelve kilometres from the pod."

"You walked it."

"I did."

"'course you did." Her voice was a scrape. Her eyes opened a slit, and the violet in them had washed out to almost nothing, and there was black dust in the creases of the lids. She turned her thumb without thinking, brought the sunburst round to the front, looked at it, and let it fall back.

"Leon."

"I'm here."

"It's all right," she said. "You've never got a number wrong."

He watched the grit run past the doorway.

Eleven days before the fleet came, he had stood on the roof of the west tower with his coffee going cold and watched a point of light move fifteen seconds of arc in four minutes. He had computed it. He had assigned it to a ranging-array artefact. He had gone downstairs.

Fifteen seconds in four minutes. He could still see the figures. They were in him the way his own name was in him, and they would still be there when he was sixty, if he made sixty, which the curve said he would not.

"Sleep," he said.

"Did you get it?" Her fingers moved, meaning the cassette, meaning the thing Pip carried in its belly. "Did you get it."

The wind came round the corner of the fabricator, dropped a handful of dust in the doorway, and took most of it away again.

"I got it," Leon said. "In the morning. With water."

"'kay."

"Sleep."

She did, in about forty seconds, the way she had learned to in the pod.

He sat with his back against a stranger's door on a world nobody had thought about in two hundred years and did the sum that was left. Thirty-one a week for the drug. Bread at three-tenths. A room over a shop, somebody in the queue had said, twenty-two a month. Four marks for nine hours in a hole in the ground, paid at the gate, four dead a month taken out of it in a box.

Thirty-one against four. Eight shifts a week to buy seven days, in a week that had six.

He turned his right hand over in the half-light and looked at the ring on it, and then he put the hand down, and made himself sit still, and watched the street, and waited for the market to open.

The pawn stall was third from the end of the second row, under a section of solar sheet patched twice with rivets and once with something that had been a bootheel. A man called Muldrow ran it. Scale, loupe, strongbox bolted through the table into the ground. He had the unhurried manner of a man who had never in his life needed to speak first.

Leon put the ring on the cloth.

Muldrow looked at it for a while without touching it. Aureate Academy, first cohort. Sunburst and compass. The band worn thin on the palm side from four years of a hand that gripped a simulator stick too hard.

It was the last thing Leon owned from before. He had carried it in a sock for five weeks in a two-berth pod and had not once taken it out.

"Reach work," Muldrow said.

"Yes."

"Reach isn't buying at the moment."

"I noticed."

Muldrow picked it up. Turned it. Put the loupe to it, breathed on the inside of the band, read the assay stamp, and set it down half an inch from where it had been, which Leon understood to be a form of speech.

"Two hundred."

"Three hundred. It's twenty-two grams of aureate alloy. The stones are synthetic and worth nothing. The metal alone at your posted rate this morning is two hundred and sixty-one." Leon did not gesture. "Your board's behind your left shoulder."

Muldrow did not look behind his left shoulder.

"Posted rate's for clean stock in kilo lots," he said. "Not one ring off a man who walked in from the shuttle field in a coat he's been sleeping in."

"Two eighty."

"Two hundred."

"Two sixty."

Muldrow leaned back. Behind him a woman was frying dough rings in grey oil, six for a mark, and the smell of it went through Leon like a hand closing.

"Here's what it is," Muldrow said, and he said it without malice, which was worse. "You need it today. Everyone at this table needs it today. I can tell the ones who don't, because they leave and come back on the third day and by then they've priced it themselves. You won't leave. It's in your mouth. So it's two hundred, and if you argue past that it's one ninety, because my time's worth something too."

Two hundred is 6.45 weeks. Two forty is 7.74. Three hundred is 9.67.

The arithmetic did that on its own. It always had. Aria had called it a party trick. Their mother had called it a nervous habit. Both of them had been right.

"Two forty," Leon said. "And here's why. You'll melt it and get two sixty-one, and you'll spend nothing getting it, because I walked to you. At two forty you make twenty-one marks for standing still. At two hundred you make sixty-one — but then I go to the assay office on the fourth row, who pay two thirty-five and take four days. I'd rather not take four days. I will though."

He kept his voice level and slightly bored. That cost him more than the walk had.

Muldrow looked at him a beat longer. Then he unbolted the box and counted the notes out onto the cloth in fives. Forty-eight of them. Leon watched his own hands stay still.

"Two forty."

"Thank you."

"Don't come back with your boots," Muldrow said. "I don't take boots."

The ring went into a tray with a broken clock, three signal keys and somebody's dental bridge. Leon folded the money into his inside pocket and did not look at the tray again.

He stood in the middle of the second row and did the sum properly, because doing it properly was the only ceremony available.

Tessamine. Thirty-one marks a week. One dose morning, one night, from the clinic dispensary. No substitute, no generic, no cheaper source inside a hundred and forty light years.

240 divided by 31 was 7.741.

Seven weeks, five days.

He was not sentimental about the ring. Objects were mass and function, and he had grown up in a house so full of beautiful ones they had stopped registering. What he felt standing there was the flat relief of a number moving from four days to fifty-four. Under the relief, arriving late, like thunder does: he had just spent the last thing he had, and it had bought under two months.

On the way back he stopped at a clothing frame on the end of the fourth row.

The cardigan hanging on it was secondhand, two sizes too big, washed so often it had gone the colour of skimmed milk. It was the only white thing in the market. Everything else on Veridus-9 was the colour of the sky, which was the colour of iron filings, which was the colour of the dust, which got into seals and teeth and the weave of fabric and did not come out.

Hers had been white eleven weeks ago. It was grey-beige now at the cuffs and the shoulders and everywhere the dust settled, and she had stopped mentioning it, which was how he knew.

"Three marks," the woman said. "It's a stupid colour for here."

"It is."

"Two and a half if you take the pull in the sleeve."

He took the pull in the sleeve. He paid two and a half, which made it 7.66 weeks, and he noted the figure and found that he did not care about it, and noticing that he did not care was the most interesting thing that had happened to him in a month.

The Bellows took him because the Bellows took everyone. There was no interview. A man in a booth asked his name, wrote L. Asher on a slate without asking how to spell it, and said the cage went down at the sixth bell and if he wasn't in it he wasn't paid.

Nine hours. Four marks.

The cage was a steel box eleven feet by eleven, mesh floor, thirty bodies standing in it. It did not descend so much as fall in a controlled manner, winch drum shrieking somewhere overhead, shaft wall going past in strips of dark and lamplight. Nine hundred and forty metres. Two minutes ten. Everyone else rode it with knees bent and eyes shut. Leon learned to do that on the fourth day.

Then the doors, and the heat.

He had expected cold. A hole in the ground on a dead world: cold. But go down far enough and the rock is warm on its own, and the ventilation plant had been sized for a workforce a third of this one, and the working faces sat at thirty-four degrees with the humidity of a mouth. Within ten minutes the dust was stuck to him. Within an hour it was in the creases of his elbows, behind his ears, in his gums, where it tasted of metal and then of nothing.

His job for eleven days was mucking. Shovelling broken ore off the floor of the drive onto a belt at chest height, all shift, with a scoop shovel that weighed two and a quarter kilos empty.

He was bad at it.

He was bad at it in a way that genuinely surprised him, because he had never been bad at anything, and this badness was total and physical and had no clever route around it. He lifted with his arms and his back. He overloaded the blade, because a full blade was obviously more efficient, then had to fight it up to the belt and lost a third of it off the side and did it again. He worked in bursts and then stood breathing. In the third hour of the first shift his forearms shook too hard to hold the blade level, and a woman named Sallis Bree, fifty-one years old and half his mass, moved eleven tonnes past his elbow without once appearing to hurry.

His hands went first.

Pilot's hands. Twelve years of stick and throttle and haptic gloves, and every callus in the wrong place — the pads under the fingers, the web of the thumb. Nothing on the palm. Nothing where a shovel handle rides.

Day one: two blisters, right palm, one the size of a coin.

Day two: four. The coin burst in the second hour and the raw skin under it took the handle for seven more.

Day four: blood in the glove. Not dramatically. A smear. The liner stuck to it coming off and he wet it in the wash trough to get it free, and went down the next morning and did it again, because the shift bell has no opinion about your hands.

He did not tell her. He kept his hands in his pockets in the room for nine days, and when she asked he said the gloves were new. She tilted her head at him for slightly too long and then let it go, which she almost never did.

She's managing me, he thought. Let her. If she can't manage me she has nothing.

On the eleventh day he stopped being bad at it.

Not because he got stronger. Strength came later, over months, and it was a slow ugly business. He stopped being bad at it because on the ninth day he gave up forty minutes of his own break and watched Sallis Bree instead.

She did not lift. That was the whole thing.

She set her feet at forty degrees to the muck pile, dropped the blade flat, drove it in off the back foot, then rotated — hips first, shovel following, the load never rising higher than the belt lip, the blade turning over at the top so the ore fell off rather than being thrown. Her arms did almost nothing. The shovel was a lever on a fulcrum made out of her own hip. The cycle took 2.2 seconds and she ran it, he counted, one thousand six hundred and eighty times in a shift, with a variance he could not detect.

He copied it exactly. Foot angle. Push. Rotate. The flick at the top.

"You're counting me," Sallis said on the tenth day, not turning round.

"I'm admiring you."

"Same thing off a Reach boy." She spat grit. "Blade flat. You're still stabbing it."

It felt wrong for two days and then it felt like nothing at all. On the fourteenth day he had his tonnage past the belt by the fifth bell and stood there flexing a ruined hand, understanding with something close to amusement that this was the same skill it had always been. Find whoever is best. Take the model apart. Run it.

It had made him first in his cohort at the Aureate Academy. It made him an adequate mucker in the Bellows.

Aria used to say it was never talent. It was noticing.

He put the thought down the way you put down something hot.

By week seven the blisters were gone and there was a yellow ridge of callus across the base of all four fingers on both hands, hard enough that he could push a thumbnail into it and feel nothing at all. Eliana found it one evening, took his hand in both of hers and ran her thumb across the ridge.

"That's disgusting."

"That's craftsmanship."

"That's a hoof."

"You'd be lucky to have hands like these."

"I would be lucky," she said, "to have hands that don't catch on the blanket."

The arithmetic, laid flat, went like this.

Four marks a shift. Six shifts, because the seventh was maintenance and the cage did not run. Twenty-four marks.

Out of twenty-four:

Room, 22 a month. He refused to round that to five and a half. Two hundred and sixty-four a year over fifty-two weeks: 5.07.

Water levy, 1.40 a week for two, non-optional, metered at the standpipe.

Power, 0.60. Most of that was Pip, whose cells had degraded to where a full charge took eleven hours and did not hold overnight.

Food. Bread 0.3 a loaf. Protein paste 0.9 a tub, four days if you were careful about it. Onions when there were onions, 0.2 each, and there were onions for two weeks out of nine. Call it 6.30 a week for two people eating badly.

Tessamine, 31.

Total: 44.37.

Income: 24.

Short 20.37. Every week. Indefinitely.

He knew that figure at all times the way other people know what day it is. It sat behind the shovel cycle and behind conversation and behind sleep. Twenty marks and thirty-seven pennies, every seven days, out of nothing.

Doctor Orr counted the ampoules onto the dispensary counter in front of him rather than handing him the box, which he assumed was policy and later worked out was courtesy: it let him check the number without asking.

"Fourteen. Thirty-one marks."

He put the notes down. She did not touch them yet.

"It came in at thirty-one this month," Orr said. "It came in at twenty-six in the spring. The corridors are closed and my supplier is charging me what he's charged since. I'm not marking it up. I want you to know that before it's forty."

"Will it be forty?"

"It'll be what it is." She swept the notes into the drawer. "Don't ration it. People ration it. They halve the evening dose and tell me they're doing fine, and then I get them at eleven at night with their heart doing something stupid, and I have equipment two generations out of date and a resuscitation kit I've refilled myself twice."

"I won't ration it."

"You'll want to." Orr looked at him properly for the first time. "You've dropped weight."

"I've taken up a sport."

"Mm," she said, and turned back to her shelves, which he understood to be the end of it.

So he closed the gap.

He took night shift twice a week when they offered it. Another four marks for another nine hours, which meant sleeping four and a half hours in a day and running the shovel cycle with a body that had gone stupid and clumsy at the edges.

He worked salvage on the maintenance day, out on the tailings flats where the old ore haulers had been left where they died, stripping copper bus bar and lattice conduit and anything with a rare-earth core, and sold it by weight to a broker off the fourth row at a rate that was robbery and still came to six or nine marks in a day. He learned to spot a hauler with an intact charge coil from two hundred metres by the sag of its rear housing. Nine marks, if the coil was dry. Four if the seals had gone.

That got him to about forty-one on a good week.

The rest of it he got another way.

He came home on a maintenance evening in the eighth week with sixty marks folded into his boot and the two smallest knuckles of his left hand split open. He washed his hands in the trough downstairs for a long time before he went up. When Eliana asked, he said a bus bar had come off the clamp and taken his hand into a bracket.

"That's stupid," she said. "Be more careful."

"I know."

He put the money in the tin.

The room was above Garren Doss's shop, at the top of an outside stair with a handrail loose at the lowest two bolts. Leon fixed it on the second day because it was there.

Garren was two hundred and sixteen, which on Veridus-9 made him the oldest man most people had ever met. He had the lungs of someone who had spent thirty years breathing lattice dust in a bay with no extraction. He coughed in a pattern — three, a pause, one more — and did not apologise for it. Hands like shovel blades. Two measures of something amber at the end of the day, poured to the same height in the same glass, then the bottle went back on the shelf. Leon watched him do that for four weeks before he believed it.

The price of the room had been an accident.

Leon had asked what it cost. Garren had looked at him, and then past him at Eliana sitting on the bottom step — thirty kilos of her, in a cardigan gone the wrong colour, her mother's signet turned round on her thumb so the sunburst sat on the back of her hand where it wouldn't catch on anything — and Garren had said "Twenty-two a month" in the voice of a man surprised by his own mouth.

Then, immediately and much more firmly: "No deposit. I'm not running a bank."

He asked nothing. Not where they had come from. Not about the pod out on the flats a hundred kilometres east. Not why a man who talked like that was mucking ore, not why the girl never went out in daylight without a scarf over her hair. In nine weeks Garren Doss asked Leon Zadkiel exactly one personal question, and the question was whether he could weld.

Twice, on cold nights — and the nights ran long here, the days going to eighty hours — Leon opened the door in the morning and found a resistance heater on the landing, plugged into the shop circuit rather than the room's meter.

"Your heater's outside."

"Isn't mine."

"It's got your inventory tag on it."

"Then someone's stealing my tags," Garren said, and went back under the axle.

And once, in the shop, when Leon was helping him free a seized bearing race for nothing because it was that or sit upstairs doing sums, Garren spoke without looking up and without pausing, in exactly the tone he used for weather.

"Choke up. You're holding it like a stick. Hand at the head, not the heel. You want the mass doing the work, not your wrist."

Leon moved his hand. The race came free on the next swing.

Neither of them said anything else about it. Leon lay awake that night with you're holding it like a stick going round, and decided it was coincidence, because the alternative required believing that someone on this planet had once watched somebody fly.

One room. Four and a half metres by three.

One bed: a steel cot with a mattress out of the mine dormitories that smelled like the mine dormitories.

Eliana got the bed. There had been one conversation about it, the first night, which Leon won by lying down on the floor and pretending to be asleep before she could finish her sentence. He re-won it nightly with a lie he had polished to a shine — that his back preferred a hard surface, that Academy bunks had been boards anyway, that soft mattresses gave him a stiff neck. All of it false. He was a hundred and eighty-five centimetres and the floor was a plascrete slab, and he woke every morning with his hip aching and his right shoulder numb to the elbow.

The geography of the room settled inside a fortnight and then did not change again.

The Tessamine lived in a biscuit tin in the north corner against the outer wall, because it degraded above eighteen degrees and that corner ran coldest. A folded shirt under the tin so it did not sit on the boards and take up damp. Seven ampoules to a box, two boxes a week. He counted them every morning while she was still asleep. It took three seconds and he could not make himself stop.

Pip charged on the socket beside the door, on a shelf Leon had cut from a crate lid, because that socket had the least voltage sag when the shop compressor cycled downstairs. The drone sounded like a wasp in a jar when it flew and made no sound at all charging, and at night it dimmed its indicator to a dull ember so the light would not reach the bed. Nobody had programmed that. It had started doing it at some point in the last two years. Eliana had never mentioned it. Neither had he.

The window did not seal. Bad frame when it was new, and it had settled since: a gap of about four millimetres along the top edge, through which the grit came in a fine continuous whisper on windy nights, so that by morning there was a grey line along the sill in the exact shape of the gap.

They fixed it three times. Tape, which failed in four days. A strip of conveyor belting wedged in, which held two weeks and then let go at three in the morning and nearly stopped both their hearts. Finally a bead of vulcanising compound that Garren left out on the workbench in a position that could not be described as accidental. That one held.

The dust still came in. It came in on them, on their clothes, in their boots, and there was no fixing that. Every third day Eliana beat the cardigan out over the landing rail, and every third day it came back marginally less white, and she never said one word about it.

He came home on the fifty-eighth day covered to the eyebrows.

The pithead trough had run dry at the seventh bell, so he had managed face and forearms and nothing else. Everything from the collar down was the fine grey-black of ore fines packed into fabric. His shoulders had stopped hurting in the third week and been replaced by something quieter and more permanent.

He got to the top of the stair, opened the door, and stopped.

Every object they owned was on the floor. In rows.

"Don't move," Eliana said.

"I'm not moving."

"You're moving."

"I am standing."

"You're standing badly." She was on her knees at the far end of the room with a strip of ration paper held in her teeth. There were — he counted, involuntarily, because that is what his brain does — forty-three items laid out on the boards in six columns, each column headed by a torn strip of paper with a word on it in her small upright hand. "This is a system. I made a system."

"You made a system."

"It's an inventory." She spat the paper into her palm. "Six categories. Cutlery. Tools. Medical. Fabric. Things That Are Broken But We Are Keeping. And Pip."

"Pip is a category."

"Pip is a category of one, yes, thank you, he was extremely difficult to place." She sat back on her heels. Her hair was up under the scarf, which she hated. Two strands had escaped and hung in her face and she blew at them without result. "Also I need a ruling. The spoon."

"There is one spoon."

"There is one spoon and it is in the wrong column, because you have been using it to lever the lid off the fuel can, which makes it a tool, and I want it back in Cutlery where it lives."

"It's a multi-role asset."

"It's a spoon, Leon."

"It's a spoon with a secondary capability."

"It has a bend in it."

"That's the capability."

She threw a bolt at him. She threw it about as hard as a person of thirty kilos throws things, which meant he caught it out of the air one-handed without thinking and then had to stand there holding it, feeling ridiculous.

"Tools," she said, pointing. "Third column, second row. There's an order. It goes by thread pitch."

He looked down. Nine bolts, ascending, left to right.

"Where did you get nine bolts?"

"Garren's floor. He says anything under the bench is officially lost, so it's salvage." Enormous satisfaction. "I've been under there twice. There's a whole civilisation under that bench."

"You've been crawling under a hydraulic press."

"It wasn't switched on."

"Eliana."

"It wasn't switched on, I checked the isolator, I'm not an idiot. I'm bored." She glared up at him with her chin set, and her eyes were doing the thing they did, the pale violet going a shade deeper toward the outer ring. "I am so bored. I have organised this room four times. Four. I alphabetised our food, and we have two foods."

"Short job."

"It was an insultingly short job." She pressed the last bolt into line with one finger. "I want work. A ledger. Somebody in this town keeps a ledger."

"No."

"You didn't think about it."

"I thought about it very fast."

"That's not the same —"

"Somebody keeping a ledger would have to look at you," Leon said. He made it light. It came out light. It cost him roughly what the shift had. "For hours. Every day. Across a table."

She opened her mouth. Closed it.

"That's a horrible argument."

"It's an excellent argument."

"It's effective. That's different." She got up off her knees the careful way, one hand on the bed frame, eight seconds about it, and he made himself not step forward. "Anyway. When you get some real clothes, we'll consider letting you have opinions."

"That's mine."

"What's yours?"

"That's my joke. I have been making that joke since you were nine —"

"And it was never good," Eliana said, "and I have improved it, and now it's mine, and you can't have it back, because there's a system." She tapped the paper strip by her knee. "It's logged."

He stood in the doorway with ore dust on him and a bolt in his hand and laughed.

The sound surprised him. He heard it from somewhere slightly outside himself, and thought, clearly, hold on to that, you'll need to do it on purpose later, and then put the thought away, because it was not a thing you looked at directly.

"Fine," he said.

"Say I win."

"You don't need me to say it. It's in the ledger."

"Say it."

"You win."

"Thank you." She sat down on the edge of the bed, radiant with it, and began re-sorting the Fabric column for no reason he could determine. "Sit. You're swaying. You're dropping half of Veridus into my Medical."

He sat on the floor with his back to the wall by the door, in the corner where the heater had been that morning, where the socket hummed with Pip's charge cycle. He started to say that the compound on the window had cracked along the top left and wanted checking, and that on the maintenance day he was going out past the marker because there was a hauler two kilometres beyond it with a sagging rear housing, and if the coil was dry that was nine marks, maybe ten, and with ten they could reach the end of the month without opening the tin, and that the number he needed was twenty marks and thirty-seven

He woke because his neck had gone over sideways and the muscle had pulled.

The lamp was at its lowest setting. The room was cold. The window was holding.

Across the boards the six columns had been squared up and the paper strips straightened. The spoon was in Cutlery.

There was a blanket over him. Their only blanket, off the bed, tucked at the shoulders, folded under along one side with the kind of care that takes several attempts.

His legs were still flat out across the floor where they had fallen. Boots on. Dust and all.

The folded coat had been moved to the end of them. One bootlace was undone where she had picked at it and stopped.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed with her arms around her shins and her chin on her knees, looking at his legs.

"Go to sleep," Leon said.

"I am asleep."

"You're sitting up."

"So are you." Her voice did not do what she wanted it to do. She heard that, and turned her face into her knees.

"Eliana."

"What."

"Blanket goes back on the bed."

"No," she said, into her knees. "That's Fabric. It's logged."

He let her have it.

He lay down on his side on the plascrete with the blanket over his shoulders and his boots on, and counted the ampoules in the tin from memory — nineteen — and ran the week forward, four and four and four, and the hauler out past the marker, and the gap. Somewhere in the middle of it, unbidden, the number 91.7 went past like a light on a dark road.

He did not follow it.

He slept.

The first-shift bell went at five, and by then Leon had been gone eleven minutes.

Eliana lay in the dark and listened to the room. She had learned it the way she had once learned scores, not by trying, just by being left alone with it long enough. The window frame ticked when the wind came off the tailings. The prefab wall behind her head made a sound like a knuckle cracking when the temperature moved through it. Downstairs, Garren Doss coughed twice, spat, and started the compressor.

Above her, near the corner, Pip hovered with its lights dimmed to almost nothing.

It did that so she could sleep. She had never told it to. Some technician on Halcyon had written that behaviour into it years ago and then died, probably, in ninety minutes, along with eleven million other people who had also thought of small kindnesses in advance.

"You can turn them up," she said.

Pip brightened by one increment. Its fans made the sound they always made, a wasp in a jar, and under that sound was a new one, a faint irregularity on the intake side that had started in month three and had not gone away. Its cells were dying. Nothing on this planet could replace them.

She lay there a while longer. Then she got up, because the alternative was lying there.

The room was three and a half metres by four. She had measured it with her feet, heel to toe, on the second day, when measuring things had still felt like an act of possession rather than a symptom.

There was a bed. There was a second mattress on the floor that Leon rolled against the wall every morning so she would have room to walk. There was a crate they used as a table, an induction plate with one working ring, a bucket, a basin, and a shelf.

On the shelf: four cups, two of which matched. A tin of salt. A paper twist of tea leaves that had been used twice already and would be used again. The flat grey box of tessamine ampoules with eleven days left in it.

The window did not seal. Garren had tried. Leon had tried twice, once with epoxy and once with a strip of cut inner tube, and the grit still came through in a fine talc line along the sill. By evening you could write in it. She never wrote in it. If she wrote in it, Leon would see it, and know how the day had gone.

She wiped the sill with the side of her hand and shook her hand out the window.

The sky over Ninepenny was the colour of an unpolished blade. It was that colour at dawn and it was that colour at noon, all through the long slow crawl of a day that ran thirty-one standard hours and that nobody's body had ever agreed to. That was why the mine kept its own time. The Bellows rang a bell at the start of a shift and a bell at the end, nine hours apart, and the whole settlement lived inside that rhythm because there was no other one.

Four bells was a day.

She counted the bells. That was the thing she had not said out loud, not to Leon, not to Garren, not to the doctor with the bitten-down nails.

She counted the bells.

By the second bell she had done everything.

She had washed in two litres. She had eaten a third of a loaf, dry, because the fat went to Leon, who spent nine hours in a hole with a rock hammer. She had rinsed the cup and dried the cup and put the cup back on the shelf where it went. Then she had stood in the middle of the room with the whole of her mind switched on and nothing to put it on.

Downstairs there was a terminal, an old Concord-standard workshop unit with a cracked bezel, and on it a local cache: two hundred and six technical documents, sixteen novels, an almanac, and a farming manual for a world with soil.

She had read all of it. Then she had read all of it again.

She could recite the fault tree for the Hallam-Voss coolant loop. She knew more about the metallurgy of rare-earth sinter than any person on this planet who did not personally sinter rare earth. Three weeks ago she had gone down and told Garren his lathe's tailstock was running two-tenths out and chewing his stock on the return pass. He had squinted at her for a long moment, and checked, and it was, and he had said huh, and fixed it.

She had lived on that huh for four days.

That was the part nobody warned you about. Not the pain. Not the prognosis, which Doctor Orr had delivered in a flat voice with her hand already reaching for the next file — maybe two years, and I want you to hear the word maybe. Not even the sound her mother had made through a filling lung, which was in her at all times, under everything, like the compressor.

It was that she was twenty-one and awake fourteen hours a day in a box with a drone.

She went down at the half-hour with the empty flask, which was an excuse, and Garren knew it was an excuse.

He was under the bench with a spool of filament and a headache. His hands were the size of dinner plates. When he breathed out you could hear the thirty years of lattice dust in it, a wet crackle at the bottom of the exhale, like paper being screwed up in another room.

"Standpipe's cheaper before third bell," he said, without looking. "Half a penny for twenty litres. After that it's a whole one, because they can."

"I know." She stood there. "Do you need anything sorted."

"No."

"You have four bins of unsorted fittings behind the hangar door and one of them has been rained on, which on this planet is remarkable."

"Yes."

"So."

Garren put the spool down. He looked at her the way he looked at a weld he had not made himself.

"You want me to give you work so your brother comes home and finds you paid," he said. "And then he comes down here and puts his fist through my door frame, which I built, and which I like."

"He wouldn't."

"He would." He picked the spool back up. "No."

She stood in his shop and hated him for eleven seconds, cleanly and completely, and then stopped, because he was right, and because being right was the local weather.

"The tailstock's holding," he said, to the underside of the bench.

"I know," she said. "I heard it."

Here is the arithmetic. She had done it in the second week and had never needed to do it again, because she was her father's daughter and numbers stayed where she put them.

Tessamine: thirty-one marks a week, from the clinic, and there was no cheaper source, and Doctor Orr had checked, and had not enjoyed telling her so.

A shift at the Bellows: nine hours. Four marks.

Thirty-one divided by four is seven and three quarters.

Seven point seven five shifts. Every week. For her.

Sixty-nine hours and forty-five minutes of her brother in the dark with a hammer, so that a clear liquid could go into her arm and slow, but not stop, the thing taking her apart at a rate that could be plotted.

Four hundred and three shifts a year. One thousand six hundred and twelve marks.

She had run it further, because once you start you finish. Rent was twenty-two a month. Bread was three tenths. On four marks a day with no tessamine, Leon Zadkiel could eat, sleep, put aside eleven marks a week, and buy passage off this world in fourteen months.

She had worked that out on a morning in month two, at the window, and had felt her mind arrive at the answer the way it always did, cleanly, with a small click of satisfaction, before the rest of her caught up.

She had never said the number to anyone.

The plan took four days to build and she enjoyed every hour of it.

Ruska Idel ran the third row of the market, under the sagging bit of solar sheet where the water would have come through if it ever rained. Ruska bought scrap by weight and sold it by function, and the whole difference between those two prices was sorting. Ferrous from non-ferrous. Intact connectors from sheared. Cable with copper in it from cable with nothing in it, and the ends stripped.

Sitting-down work. Hand work. Four hours. Two marks.

Eliana wrote the operation out on the back of a clinic receipt.

Sit the whole time. Do not stand to reach. Move the crate, not the body. One mouthful of water every twenty minutes, nine mouthfuls in the flask, do not ration it, rationing is how the mistake happens. Eat first. Eat a whole third and take the fat this once, one day of fat will not show. Cardigan on, mornings are cold and cold makes it worse. Scarf on. Hair fully under. Do not lift the flatbed crate. Asking is not failing. If the grey starts at the edges: stop, head down, count sixty. It passes. It has always passed.

She read it back and added a line.

Do not tell him until it is done and the money is in your hand.

Then she folded the receipt very small and put it in the pocket of her skirt, where the seam had gone and Garren had sewn it with fishing filament, because Leon's hands were not good at small things.

Pip watched all of it on standby and said nothing, because it was a medical drone and not a conscience.

She left at second bell with her hair under the scarf, sneakers going scuff, scuff through the grit. They had been white for about ninety minutes of their life on Veridus-9.

Ruska looked at her for four full seconds.

"You're the one lives over Doss."

"Yes."

"You're not built for it."

"I'm built for sitting on a crate and telling copper from aluminium," Eliana said. "Which you're doing at about forty percent, because there's copper-clad in your copper bin, and you're going to get paid clad prices for the lot."

Ruska's face did something at the corner.

"Four hours. Two marks. You slow me down, you get one."

"Fair," said Eliana, and sat down on the crate, and began.

It was good.

That was the thing she would think about afterwards, lying in the dark with the taste still in her mouth. Not that it went wrong. That for two hours and forty minutes it was so good.

Her hands remembered how to be quick. The pile came apart under them into its proper kinds — ferrous left, non-ferrous right, cable in the tub, connectors in the tray — and after twenty minutes the rhythm got into her arms and she did not have to think about it at all. The thinking part of her, the part that had spent four months in a box eating itself, got to stand back and watch her body do a job.

In the third crate she found a Hallam-Voss regulator with its housing crushed and its core untouched. She said so. Ruska turned it over, swore, and put it under the counter, and that one piece was worth nine marks, and they both knew it.

"Where'd you learn scrap?"

"I read a book."

"You read a book," said Ruska.

"Twice," said Eliana.

A man came for hose clamps and asked her, not Ruska, whether a six-millimetre would hold on a nine-mil line. She said no. He said what would. She told him. He paid and went away.

Forty seconds, perhaps. It was the best forty seconds she had had since Halcyon.

He had spoken to her like a person who might know something. Not gently. Not carefully. Not the way they spoke to her at the clinic, and not the way Leon spoke to her at night, with all that warmth he hauled up from somewhere and set down in front of her like a heavy thing carried up a stair.

Just: hey, does the six hold?

At two hours she drank her sixth mouthful on schedule and put her head down for a count of sixty, because the light had gone slightly wrong, and it came back, because it always came back.

At two hours twenty Ruska put half a strip of dried fruit on the crate beside her without looking. "Eat that or you'll go over."

At two hours thirty-five the last of the cable was stripped, and there were four sorted piles where a mountain had been, and Eliana looked at them and had to work out what the tightness in her chest was, because she had not felt it in a hundred and twenty-two days.

She was pleased with herself.

At two hours forty she stood up to move a crate. She had moved eleven. This was the twelfth. It was not heavy.

The grey came in from the edges.

She knew the sequence. The periphery goes soft, like someone closing an aperture, and the world narrows to a tunnel the width of a hand held out at arm's length. Then the sound thickens. Ruska's voice was still there and it was underwater. Her own pulse arrived in her ears at about a hundred and forty and climbing.

Her hands went cold. Not cool. Cold, all at once.

Head down. Count sixty.

She put her hand out for the counter. The counter was not where she had left it.

Copper in her mouth. Bright, wet, a penny taste, and it came before the cough did, so that for one second she was able to think, quite clearly, ah, that's what that is.

Then she was on her hands and knees in the dust with no memory of the distance.

The cough came up out of her with its own opinion. It went into the dust in front of her hands. She looked at it. Eight millilitres. Bright red, frothed at the edge, which meant lung.

The second cough came and she stopped estimating.

Pip's alarm went off above her head. Three rising tones. A pause. Three rising tones.

The row went back one step. All of it, at once, like a tide.

"Get her out of the row," a woman said, not cruelly. "She's on the goods, she's on the —"

"Is that blood? My kid's here."

"She's not sick like that." Ruska, somewhere. "She's not sick like that."

Her scarf came off. She felt it go, and the air on her scalp, and the weight coming down over her shoulder in a sheet, and she thought, pick it up, and her arms would not.

Silver-white in the dust. In four rows of stalls where every head was black or brown or grey.

She coughed a third time and put her forehead on the ground.

Then hands. Big ones, careful, one under her shoulder, one flat on her back, and a coat that smelled of solder and cold grease.

"Easy. Don't get up. Breathe out, don't fight it." A man's voice, mid-forties, tired, patient in the specific way of someone who has done this with children. "Leave the drone, it's hers. Where's she live?"

"Over Doss," said Ruska.

"Right," he said. "All right. You're all right."

He was the only one who had come forward. She would remember that.

She got her eyes open and saw him upside down and grey at the edges. A jaw needing a shave. A chip out of one front tooth. Three days of not sleeping around the eyes.

He was not looking at her face any more.

He was looking at her hair.

Leon came.

She did not remember anybody going for him, so it was probably not long. Later she would work out that he had walked off shift four hours early, which cost him the whole four marks, because the Bellows did not pay part-shifts.

By then she was sitting up against the leg of Ruska's table with a rag at her mouth. There was blood on the rag and blood down the front of the cardigan, dried brown at the collar, still wet lower, and dust worked into all of it, so that the whole front of her was the colour of the ground.

He crossed the row without hurrying. That was the thing. He came through at a walking pace with his face perfectly still and rock dust in his eyebrows, and crouched, and checked her pupils, and checked the rag, and asked Pip for her sats in a level voice. Pip told him. He nodded.

"Can you stand?"

"Yes."

"Don't."

One arm under her knees, one behind her back. She weighed twenty-nine kilos and he had been swinging a hammer for five hours and he lifted her like a coat.

Going out of the row she saw the man with the chipped tooth still standing where he had been, hands at his sides, watching them go.

Leon said nothing the whole way. Not up the street, not up the outside stair, not past Garren in the shop doorway with his hands full of gasket.

He put her on the bed. He took her sneakers off, both of them, and set them side by side. He filled a cup and put it into her hands and closed her fingers on it with his own. He rinsed the rag. He got the second blanket.

Then he stood up and put both hands flat on the wall above the crate and stayed like that.

"Two marks," he said.

"Leon —"

"Two marks." He turned around. "You went out for two marks."

"I was fine —"

"You were on the ground!" It came out of him at a volume she had never heard in twenty-one years. Not when the Ring fell. Not in the pod. It hit the walls of a three-and-a-half-metre room and came back at both of them. "On your hands and knees in the road, bleeding, with forty people standing round you, and not one of them — not one —"

"One did."

"Not one of them knows what to do when you go down. I know what to do. Garren knows what to do. That's two people on this planet and I was four hundred metres under it." His voice broke in the middle and he went on through the break, which was worse. "I'm not asking you to be brave. You're the bravest person I've ever met, you're unbearable about it. I'm asking you to sit in the room. That's the whole job. Sit in the room and be alive in it and let me do the rest."

"That is not a job."

"It's the only one that matters."

"To you —"

"You don't get to do this." He was down on his heels in front of her, close, and his hands were shaking, and she watched him notice and put them on his knees to stop it. "You don't get to spend yourself to feel better. That's not brave, that's you deciding you'd rather be useful for four hours than be here for two years, and I don't get a vote, I just get to carry you home —"

"Say the rest of it."

"There isn't a rest of it."

"There's always a rest of it with you. Say it."

And he said, "Mum died so you could sit in a room. So sit in the room."

The compressor cut out downstairs. In the quiet after it the window frame ticked twice.

She watched him understand what he had said. It went across his face in about a second and a half and then he shut it down, because that was the new thing he had learned on this planet.

He did not take it back.

Eliana put the cup on the crate. Her hands were steady. That was how it went afterwards: for about an hour everything was clear and steady and cold, as though the body, having made its point, was content to lend her the use of it.

"All right," she said. "My turn."

"El —"

"You've had yours. Sit down or stand up, I don't care. You're going to hear it, because you have been talking at me for four months and you have never once let me finish."

He sat down on the floor.

"Seven point seven five," she said.

Leon did not move.

"Thirty-one marks a week. Four marks a shift. Seven point seven five shifts. Sixty-nine hours and forty-five minutes." She kept her voice exactly level, because level was the cruellest register available to her, and she had always known that. "That's me. Every week, until I die. Four hundred and three shifts a year. One thousand six hundred and twelve marks. I've had the number since week two."

"Stop."

"You've had it since week two as well, so don't you dare —" There was the first crack in the level. She pushed it back down. "Don't pretend. I've watched your eyes move. You do it in the doorway every morning before you go. Say the number."

He looked at the floor between his boots.

"Seven point seven five," he said.

"Yes."

"El, that isn't —"

"You think you're carrying me." She leaned forward. "You're not carrying me. You're spending me. Four marks at a time, nine hours at a time, and I lie here and watch it go, and the only thing I'm permitted to contribute to this household is to be small enough to lift." Her chest hurt. She kept going. "You sold Father's ring. Two hundred and forty marks for your Academy insignia, and you came upstairs and made a joke about it, and I laughed, because that's the arrangement. You perform. I applaud."

"That's not fair."

"No. It isn't." She was crying, which infuriated her, and she did not stop and did not wipe it. "I'm twenty-one. I have maybe two years, and Sabine Orr wants me to hear the word maybe, and I've heard it, thank you, I hear it at three in the morning. Two years. And you've decided the correct way for me to spend the end of it is in a box three and a half metres by four, counting bells." Her voice went. She let it. "Do you know I count the bells? Four bells is a day. That's what you've arranged for me. That's what all that love bought."

"I'm trying to keep you alive."

"I know." She hit the mattress with the flat of her hand, once. "I know, and it doesn't help, and you have never once asked me what it costs. You asked what tessamine costs. You know that to the penny. You have never asked what the room costs."

He said nothing.

"And you said I did it to feel better." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist, roughly. "I wasn't trying to feel better. I was trying to be worth it. Two marks is half a day of you. Half a day. I was going to come home and put two marks on that crate and for one evening the arithmetic was going to be seven point two five instead of seven point seven five, and you were going to hate it, and I was going to do it again on Fifthday."

Silence.

"I got two hours forty," she said. "It was the best I've felt since Halcyon. I found a Hallam-Voss with a live core in a scrap crate, and a man asked me about hose clamps, and I knew the answer." She laughed. It turned into a cough. She got it under control. "That's the whole crime."

Leon sat with his forearms on his knees.

"I'd have taken the four marks," he said at last, quietly. "I'd have taken the four and left the room."

"I know," she said. "That's the problem with you."

Neither of them apologised. That was not how it went any more, and they both seemed to understand it at the same moment and let it alone.

He got up eventually and pulled his mattress out from the wall, and then, instead of lying on it, sat down on the floor with his back against the frame of her bed, facing the door, the way he had started sitting in month one and had never explained.

The room went dark. Nobody put the light on. Light was billed.

Eliana put her hand out and rested it on the top of his head. His hair was full of rock dust. It felt like sand under her palm. He did not move away and he did not lean into it. He sat there and let her, the way you allow a thing you cannot afford to want.

"When you get some real clothes," he said after a long while, hoarsely, to the door, "we'll talk about you having a job."

"Says the man with holes in both boots."

"Structural ventilation."

"Mm."

Pip came down off the ceiling and settled on the crate, lights at one increment, fans irregular on the intake.

Later, she did not know how much later, she surfaced to a small dry rhythmic sound and could not place it, and turned her head.

Leon sat cross-legged on the floor with the white cardigan across his knees. He was beating the dust out of it with the flat of his hand. One sleeve at a time, working from the shoulder down, the way their mother had done it with the good coats in the hall on Halcyon. The dust came up in little grey clouds you could just see against the window.

The dust would come out. Most of it, in the end.

The collar was another matter. He had not got to the collar yet.

She lay still and did not tell him.

The water heater in the room above the shop failed on a Thursday, and that was how Leon found it.

He went out to the back hangar at the end of a shift because Garren had said there was a crate of old conduit out there and he could take a metre of it if he could find a metre that wasn't split. Nine hours in the Bellows had left a headache sitting behind his eyes like a coin, grit in the creases of both elbows, and four marks in his coat. The hangar door ran on a chain hoist that had lost a link sometime in the last decade, so it went up crooked and stopped at chest height, and he had to duck.

Inside it was colder than outside. That was the first thing.

The second was the smell. Old coolant, which is sweet. Old lattice dust, which is not.

The third thing was the shape under the tarp.

It was eleven metres of shape. Even collapsed into stow posture — knees folded, head down against the chest cowling, both hands turned palm-up on the floor the way the shutdown sequence leaves them — it filled the back third of the hangar, and the tarp did not reach the ankles. He stood there with a headache and a length of split conduit in his hand and looked at the ankle actuators. Bare. Somebody had taken the shrouds off and never put them back.

AEGIS-B. Trainer variant. They made the rear seat optional after the second production run.

He pulled the tarp back one arm's length. Then another. The canvas came away stiff, and the dust went up and hung in the light and did not settle for a long time.

The paint was Directorate grey under sixty years of nothing. The unit number was still legible on the left pauldron in the flat sans they used before the Concord standardised the typeface: TR-114. Somebody had scored a line through the 4 and written 4 again, larger, badly, with a scriber.

Half of it was gone.

Not damaged. Gone. Morphic nanolattice has a mass budget — you carry so many kilos of it and it flows to where the load is, thickening a shin plate under impact, drawing itself off the back to armour the front, and the whole doctrine of the frame is that it is a machine which decides in real time where it needs to be solid. This one had been harvested. The dorsal reservoirs were dry and standing open, their hatches hanging on one hinge each. The left forearm had a lattice cavity the size of a coffin, and there was nothing in it but a dead beetle and a scrap of paper that turned out to be half a ration voucher, forty years expired.

Lattice went for nine marks a kilo on a poor world. He did the arithmetic before he could stop himself and wished he hadn't.

He was still standing there when Garren came in behind him. The old man moved like a wardrobe on a trolley, deliberate, and his lungs made the noise on the inhale that they always made.

"That's not conduit," Garren said.

"No."

"Crate's on the left."

"Right." Leon did not move. "You run the bus on it."

"Once a month. Keeps the capacitor bank from sulfating." Garren set down the thing he was carrying, which turned out to be a bucket. "You want to look, look. It's not a shrine."

He crossed to the wall and threw two knife switches and a rotary, in that order, and the trainer woke up the way old machines wake up, which is not dramatic. A relay clacked somewhere in the pelvis. The auxiliary pump came up and found its speed. The frame breathed out a little dust.

Leon closed his eyes.

The pump settled at about three thousand one hundred and forty rpm from the fundamental, with a second harmonic riding it that had no business being there, and under both, once every three seconds or so, the whole tone of the machine dipped and came back. Not a beat. A drop and a recovery. A quarter tone, maybe less.

"Your number four feed is arcing inside the sleeve," he said.

Garren said nothing.

"It's not the pump. The pump's fine. It's running rich because it's compensating." Leon opened his eyes. "There's a hairline in the shielding and it's tracking. Carbon path. Every time it jumps, the bus sags and the pump loses a fraction and picks it back up. You'll get two hundred hours. Then it welds itself shut and takes the junction with it."

The pump ran. The frame dipped, and recovered.

Garren Doss turned around and looked at him. Properly. It took about four seconds, and Leon felt every one of them, the way you feel a customs officer reading your face.

"Huh," Garren said.

Then he threw the switches back the other way, picked up his bucket, and went inside. Leon stood in the dark with the split conduit and a pulse that nine hours in a hole had not managed to raise.

He started that night.

He did not ask, and Garren did not offer, and somewhere in the first week the arrangement settled into a thing neither of them named. The hangar light was left on. A socket set that had lived in the shop was now on a crate by the trainer's foot. The small welder had been moved eight feet closer to the door, which was not a distance a man moves a welder by accident.

The shape of it was this.

A shift was nine hours and paid four marks. Tessamine was thirty-one a week from the clinic and there was nowhere else on the planet to buy it. The room was twenty-two a month. Bread was three-tenths, and the bread on Veridus-9 had grit in it, and you learned to chew from the side.

Six shifts made twenty-four, which was seven short of the medicine alone. So he took doubles on the days Mackett would sell them, which was two days in five. A double paid eight, less the half-mark Mackett kept for the paperwork. There was no paperwork.

That left the hours between the second bell and the first. Four of them. Sometimes five. He gave them to TR-114.

Shielding wire was six marks for a forty-metre spool at the stall in the fourth row that sold cable by weight. He bought it in week two by not eating on a Tuesday and a Wednesday, and told Eliana he had eaten at the mine canteen. The canteen existed. He had never once used it.

Number four came out in a night and a half. The sleeve had gone brittle along the outside of the bend, where somebody had over-flexed it during installation sixty years ago; the tool mark was still in the flange. He rewound it by hand. Forty-one turns to the inch, overlapped, four passes, and he was surprised how much he liked doing it.

Nobody had ever asked him to make anything with his hands.

At the Academy he had been the boy who had the answer before the instructor finished writing the problem, and that had been pleasant the way being tall is pleasant, and it had cost him nothing, and it had been worth exactly nothing on the day the fleet came.

This was different. This had a right answer you had to earn with your fingers, at two in the morning, with a burn on the back of your wrist and the flux stinging your eyes.

A man named Deller found him at the ore chute in the middle of the second week of month five.

Deller was about fifty, worked the north face, and had a boy of nine with a bad leg. He waited until the belt stopped for the changeover and stood with his hands in his sleeves, and he was polite about it, which made it worse.

"They say you're working on Doss's old frame."

"I'm cleaning it," Leon said. "It's a filthy machine and I have no social life."

"Is there lattice left in the dorsals?"

Leon looked at the chute. Ore went past. The belt started again and they had to raise their voices, and Deller didn't raise his much.

"Four kilos," Leon said.

"Thirty-six marks."

"Not mine to sell."

Deller nodded, the way a man does when he expected that and asked anyway. "The clinic wants eighteen for a resin cast. Orr gave me the cheap one and it's cracked twice." He shrugged. "He walks on it wrong. It's setting wrong. That's the whole thing."

"I know."

"It's sitting under a tarp," Deller said, without heat, without anything. "That's all I'd say about it. It's sitting under a tarp and my son's leg is setting wrong."

He was not wrong. That was the trouble with almost everyone in Ninepenny. Leon stood at the chute for the rest of the shift with a correct arithmetic problem in his head — thirty-six marks against four kilos of a mass budget that already could not do its job — and he did not solve it, because he had already decided the answer, and knowing that about himself did not improve the day.

Deller asked again nine days later. Leon said no again. Deller said fair enough, and they worked the same face for four months after that and were civil, and that was the part Leon thought about at night.

"You have a burn," Eliana said.

She was sitting on the bed with her feet not reaching the floor, in the cardigan he had bought her in month three off the third stall in the second row. Secondhand. Two sizes wrong. Four marks, and the woman had come down from five because it was late.

It had been white. It was now the colour Veridus-9 made everything, a sort of exhausted bone, and she washed it twice a week in a bucket and it came out no cleaner, and she wore it every single day.

"I have several," Leon said.

"You have one on your neck." She patted the mattress. He sat. She put a finger near it, not on it, and Pip lifted off the windowsill with its fans coming up, hung by his ear, and shone a light on the burn. The light was noticeably dimmer than it had been in the pod. The fans ran a half-tone lower too. He had measured it twice and stopped measuring it.

"It's a machine shop," he said. "There's a hierarchy of injuries. That one's ornamental."

"Garren says you're out there until the bell."

"Garren talks a great deal for a man of few words."

"Garren says," Eliana went on, in the voice she used when she was going to arrive somewhere and he was going to be standing there when she did, "that it's a sixty-year-old trainer with no arms."

"It has arms. One of them is hollow."

"Leon."

"It's a hobby. Some men drink."

"Some men sleep."

"Sleep's expensive here too." He said it lightly, heard exactly how it landed, and reached over and turned the signet on her thumb the right way round, sunburst to the ceiling. It would slide back inside the minute. It always did. Her wrist was thinner than it had been in the pod. He did not look at it long. "How was your day."

"I sat in a chair. I checked the clinic's consumables against the manifest and found eleven vials they'd paid for twice. Orr said I was the only person on this planet who could add." A pause. "I went to the market."

"How far into the market."

"The first row."

"Eliana."

"I sat down at the first row," she said, "on a crate, like a pensioner, and I looked at turnips, and Pip made the noise, and I came home. Do you want the receipt?"

"Did you buy anything?"

"I looked at turnips."

"That's not an answer, that's a still life."

"Point four a kilo, and they were half rot at the bottom, and the man knew it and I knew it and neither of us said so, which I thought was a very sophisticated conversation for this planet." She pulled her feet up onto the bed. "You've got flux under your eyes."

"It's fashionable in the capital."

"There isn't a capital."

He stood, because if he stayed sitting he would be asleep, and at the door he turned round.

"When you own a coat with a working collar," he said, "we can discuss whether you get opinions about my working hours. Real clothes, real conversations. That's the system."

"I hate the system."

"The system is load-bearing."

She threw a sock at him. It fell well short, which she hated, and he pretended not to see where it landed, which she hated more. He went down the stairs into the cold with the last of the day's warmth already spent, and he could feel the place it had come out of, the way you feel a tooth after it's gone.

The coolant loop was worse than the conduit.

Both dorsal radiators were missing. The ports had been blanked with plate somebody had cut freehand, badly, and the gasket faces were pitted to a depth he could feel with a thumbnail. He built new radiators out of the condenser stack from a dead atmospheric processor Garren had been using as a workbench for eleven years and had once been offered thirty marks for as scrap.

Nine nights. Four of them spent finding out that the stack's fin spacing was wrong for the dust, that it would pack solid inside a week, and that he would have to double the pitch and give away a third of his surface area to keep it breathing.

He wrote the number down.

Thirty-four percent of thermal margin, gone. It meant eleven minutes at combat load before the loop began losing the fight, and about nineteen before something in the shoulder let go.

He knew, writing it, that he was going to fly it at combat load.

The lattice he could do nothing about. Four kilos left of an original forty-six. Enough to skin the frame. Not enough to let it decide anything. No reflow, no self-repair, no thickening under load — the frame was exactly as strong as it looked, everywhere, all the time, and if you asked a limb to do what an AEGIS-B does at forty-six kilos, it would do it once.

Forty-two kilos at nine marks was three hundred and seventy-eight. It was also not for sale inside forty light years, which was the only reason he could sleep about Deller.

He slept three hours a night in month five and two and a half in month six. He learned that if you eat nothing until the second bell your hands shake at height and your welds go porous, so he ate. He learned that a man can be functional on very little and unpleasant on slightly less. He drew that line carefully and stayed on the right side of it, because of the room above the shop.

He got TR-114 standing on the fifty-ninth night.

Then he sat in it, and found the thing he had not once thought about.

The helmet was in the rear-seat locker, in a foam cutout, with a service tag on it dated forty-one years ago. Halo Link, Mark IV cortical interface, Directorate issue. He turned it over in the hangar light, looking for the governor housing, which on every link he had worn in his life sat as a small ceramic blister at the base of the occipital pad.

There was no blister. There was a flat pad, a serial, and a line of stamped text.

PILOT ASSUMES.

Third Safety Instrument. Year 33. Retroactive on everything in service. He knew the date the way he knew his own hand. This came out of service in 31.

He sat in the dark a while with the helmet in his lap.

Eighty milliseconds. Every simulator hour of his adolescence. Every recreational frame over the Halcyon flats. Every rescue rig at the Academy. You thought, and the machine did it eighty milliseconds later, because the Concord had decided in its thousandth year of peace that no human being should be permitted to touch a machine directly.

So you learned to live ahead of yourself. You built a model of your frame in your head and flew the model, and issued intent to where the machine was going to be instead of where it was, and if you were very good at it you stopped feeling the gap, the way you stop feeling your own glasses.

Cassian had never got good at it. Cassian had been braver than Leon and less precise, and he died with a governor sitting between his intention and his machine, eighty milliseconds behind a Kaelic gunnery solution, above a cargo car with sixty people in it.

Leon put the helmet on.

He walked the trainer out through the rear apron at 0340. On foot. Twelve steps, because he was not an idiot. Coolant at forty-one over ambient and climbing slower than he had feared. The gait felt like walking in another man's boots.

Then he cleared the slag heaps and lifted.

The machine did what he thought.

Not what he asked. Not after an interval. There was no interval. He thought right and the world was already going left past him. He thought stop and it had stopped. There was nothing in between. No lag, no gap, no small dead space where a governor sat deciding.

He had spent twenty-four years learning to shout across a room, and someone had taken the room away.

He rolled TR-114 once at four hundred metres over a dead mining world, and laughed inside a sixty-year-old helmet.

Four seconds. The best four seconds since the capsule window.

Then the arithmetic came, because it always came.

Eighty milliseconds. At a closing speed of nine hundred metres a second, that is seventy-two metres. Cassian had lived inside a basket seventy-two metres wide that he could not see and could not step out of. The Ring fell in eleven minutes. Eleven million in ninety.

This is what my father flew with.

This exact absence.

This is what the Reach outlawed for its own good. It is the whole reason he killed eight hundred and seventy ships and nobody else killed any.

He hung there in a stripped trainer with two-thirds of its cooling and four kilos of lattice, and the happiest four seconds of his year turned into a fact about himself. He was better at this than the civilisation that raised him. The difference was a ceramic blister the size of a thumbnail.

He flew home at eleven metres and did not roll again.

After that he went out five nights in six.

The slag canyon ran nine kilometres north of Ninepenny — a spoil cut from the first fifty years of the Bellows, two hundred metres deep in places, walls of fused tailings that had cooled into vertical glass and then cracked in weather. Nobody went there. There was nothing in it to take. At night the sky over it was the colour of a wet knife.

He gave himself drills, and he named them, because named things get done.

Blind entry. Into the cut at two hundred and forty knots with the forward sensors dark, flying the mapped profile in his head, sixty-one turns in sequence, correcting on wall-shadow at the edge of vision. Because sensors are the first thing a Kaelic frame takes off you.

Cold pass. Everything shut down but attitude and one thruster group, coasting two kilometres at ninety, radiating almost nothing, because the Kaelstrom hulls hunt heat.

Eleven. Combat load for eleven minutes exactly, the loop shrieking, shoulder temperature climbing toward the number where something lets go, learning by feel the last thirty seconds in which a frame is still a frame. He ran Eleven nine times. On the ninth he got eleven forty and a burn blister on his palm from a panel he should not have been touching.

Verdict. He did not think while he named it. A closing pass, low, from the target's four o'clock, decelerating hard at nine hundred metres so that the frame arrived at walking speed with the manipulator already open, at the height of a man's chest.

He flew Verdict against a spoil pillar in the second bend for eleven consecutive nights. He got the deceleration to one point nine seconds and the terminal accuracy to inside forty centimetres.

There was no carbine on TR-114. There never had been. It was a trainer.

By the third week he had noticed that this did not inconvenience him in the slightest, because not one of the profiles he was building needed one.

Not one of them was a rescue, either.

He laid it out on the walk back one night, boots crunching on tailings, helmet under his arm, in a column like figures. A rescue drill teaches you to arrive slow and wide, with your back to the threat and your hands full. Every profile he had built taught him to arrive fast and small, from behind, with his hands empty and open.

These are habits for getting close enough to one specific man to take hold of him.

He reached the hangar at 0510 and went to work on the number two accumulator. The bell went at 0600. He went to the Bellows.

The frame came apart on the third night of month six.

He had been shaving the deceleration on Verdict, and he made a mistake he could reconstruct afterwards in complete detail, which was somehow worse than not knowing. He had budgeted the flare on the assumption that the left shoulder would reflow eight hundred grams into the load path, the way an AEGIS-B does when you ask it to take nine gravities across a joint.

There was no eight hundred grams. There were four kilos in the entire machine, and every one of them was already somewhere.

The shoulder let go one and six-tenths of a second into the flare. He heard it. One flat crack, like a plate breaking in another room. Then the left side stopped being part of the frame, the machine yawed, and the east wall arrived at something over a hundred knots.

Glass. Noise. A long grinding slide, the wall taking the arm off at the elbow cavity. The cockpit rang like the inside of a bell and then it was quiet and he was lying at thirty degrees with dust coming down through the light of one surviving panel.

He checked, in order.

Left forearm, gone. Shoulder assembly open to the sky, actuator hanging out of it on its lines. Ribs stove in three hundred millimetres on that side. Coolant on the ground, sweet, spreading. Legs intact. Right attitude group, functional.

His eyebrow was bleeding into his eye and something in his back had been rearranged.

He brought TR-114 up out of the cut on one arm and two legs, and flew it home at forty knots, crabbing, nose-down eleven degrees to trim out the missing mass. Working out the eleven degrees took him four minutes. Then it worked perfectly.

He parked it. He climbed down. He put the helmet in the foam cutout and closed the locker.

Then he found a rag and began wiping coolant off the hip before it could get into the joint.

That was when he saw Garren in the doorway, in a coat over nightclothes, and understood from his face that he had been there some time.

Garren said nothing that night, or the next four.

On the fifth he came out at 0100 with two glasses in one hand, holding them the way big men hold small things, and set one on the crate beside the socket set.

"Two measures a night," Leon said. "You've had them."

"That's mine. The other one's yours."

Leon put down the scriber. His hands were black to the wrist, and behind his eyes were fourteen days of not sleeping, and there was a scab through his left eyebrow he had closed himself with resin because the clinic charged two marks and Orr would have asked. He picked up the glass. Local. It smelled of ash and burnt sugar. The bar sold it at six-tenths a measure, which he knew because he had priced it once and decided against it.

Garren drank a third of his, unhurried, and looked up at the ruin of the left shoulder, which Leon had got about a fifth of the way to closed.

"I've been watching you six weeks," he said.

"I know."

"You knew four."

"I knew two."

"Mm." Garren turned the glass. "You put number four back in at forty-one turns to the inch. Spec's thirty-eight. Forty-one's what you use when your wire's undergauge and you're on a hard world and you'd rather have the turns than the argument." He drank again. "That's not taught. That's picked up off a man who learned it in the field."

"I worked it out."

"I believe you." A long breath, with the noise in it. "You fly like Aria Zadkiel."

The hangar had a slow ventilation fan that turned about once every two seconds. Leon heard it turn four times.

He did not move. Not his hands, not his face, not his shoulders. Five months had gone into becoming a man with a very small surface, and the last inch of that discipline turned out to be simply this: going still, and letting the words stand in the room, and not touching them.

"Thirty years ago I was a field engineer," Garren said. "Concord Security Directorate, Nineteenth Salvage. Six years with my hands on his frame. Before the Senate. Before all the rest of it." He looked at the trainer, not at Leon. "Everyone flies a frame like it's a frame. He flew like he was already where he wanted to be and the machine was catching up out of politeness. Nobody does that. In thirty years I saw one man do it. Then I watched you do it in a stripped B with four kilos of lattice, at night, through a spoil cut, and I sat down on that bucket."

Leon looked at the coolant stain on the floor.

"And the slow pass at the second bend," Garren said. "The one where you come in from behind and stop dead with the hand open."

Neither of them said anything for a while. The fan turned.

"I'm not saying the name again," Garren said. "You don't say it either. This is a town with eleven thousand hungry people in it and a Dominion picket that comes through every forty days. A name is money."

"All right."

"Two things." Garren finished his measure and set the glass down on the crate upside down, which Leon understood to be the entire ritual of his evening and had probably been for twenty years. "First. I'm not telling anyone. Not the clinic, not the bar, not the girl. Not ever. If I go before it stops mattering, it goes with me."

"Thank you."

"Don't." No heat in it. "I'm not doing you a kindness. I'm picking a side, and I'd like to be honest with myself about which one it was."

He took his coat off the crate.

"Second." He looked at the shoulder again. At the actuator hanging on its lines. At two hundred hours of work sitting wrecked in front of them. "Whatever you're planning — and I'd have to be a fool and deaf, so we'll skip the part where you tell me it's a hobby — you're not ready. You're not close. You've got a machine with no mass, no gun, two-thirds of its cooling and one arm, and a pilot who's slept nine hours this week and is running his own body like an account he can overdraw." He shrugged the coat on. "Ready isn't courage. Ready is inventory. As you are, you'd get four seconds into the room, and then somebody would put you on the floor, and that's the end of everything you're doing this for. Including the part of it that's asleep upstairs."

He went to the door and stopped under the crooked gap.

"Fix the shoulder properly," he said. "Not fast. I've got a jig."

Then he ducked out. Leon heard him cross the yard, and the shop's back door, and after a while the house went quiet.

Leon stayed.

He worked on nothing in particular for the first hour, which he noticed and did not correct. Then he sat down on the crate with his back against the trainer's cold shin and his forearms on his knees. The fan turned. The sky in the gap under the door went from black to iron.

He looked at his hands.

Burn scar across the base of the right thumb, from the welder. The left index joint had begun to thicken. Callus in a pattern he could have drawn from memory: socket wrench, scriber, eleven hundred hours of ore chute.

They had covered a girl's eyes in a capsule.

Ninety-one point seven.

He turned them over and looked at the other side.

The bell went at 0600. He washed to the elbow at the tap by the door and went to the Bellows.

Turnips had been 0.5 a kilo last week. This week the board over Hessa Kade's stall said 0.6 in wet chalk, and under it, smaller, no credit, which was new.

Eliana looked at the number and did not do anything with her face.

That was a skill now. Seven months ago she would have made a small, exact, unmistakable face — the kind people at receptions used to lean in to watch — and instead she considered the turnips the way a person considers turnips, and waited.

"Six," said Hessa.

"Five last week."

"Six this week."

"They're the same turnips."

Hessa's mouth moved a fraction. Not a smile. An acknowledgement. "They are the same turnips. That's the problem."

Eliana picked two out of the crate. Small, both. One had a soft place near the crown that would have to be cut out with most of the top. She turned it over so Hessa could see her turning it over, and set it back down with the bad side up.

"Point four for that one."

"It's a quarter rot."

"It's a third, and it's a third that grows overnight. Point four, and I take the other at six, and you don't have to look at it tomorrow."

Hessa did the arithmetic. Everyone in Ninepenny did arithmetic out loud now; it had become a kind of weather.

"Point four," she said. "You argue like my sister."

"Your sister sounds sensible."

"My sister's dead."

Eliana put a one-mark piece on the counter. The stamping had gone smooth on it, the way it went on coins that had been in too many hands too fast.

"I'm sorry."

"Corridors," said Hessa, meaning it as a complete explanation, and it was one.

Eliana put the turnips in the bag on top of nothing, because there was nothing else in it yet, and moved along the row.

Four rows of stalls under salvaged solar sheet. The sheet was the wrong colour and it made everything under it look left out too long. Grit in the air. There was always grit in the air. She had stopped noticing it in her eyes and had not stopped noticing it in her teeth.

She was wearing the cardigan.

It had been white. It was still called white. It was two sizes too big through the shoulders because Leon had bought it off a stall in the fourth row for 1.80 and had never told her it was the only one on the table. She wore it every day. She had washed it in a bucket eleven times and the dust had won eleven times, so now the cuffs were the colour of a flue and the front was the colour of a cloud with something wrong with it, and she loved it in a way she had decided not to look at directly.

Her hair went up under a grey wrap she had bought for 0.2 from a woman who sold dead men's kit. Sixteen pins. She had counted, the first week, and now she counted every morning because counting was how you knew none had gone.

Not one strand out. There was no hair that colour anywhere between here and the Kaelstrom and everybody knew it.

The harder thing had been her chin.

There was a way she used to hold her head. She had not known she did it until she had to stop, and then it turned out she had been doing it for twenty-one years — chin level, throat long, the unhurried tilt of a person who had never once wondered whether a room would make space for her. It came back whenever she stopped thinking about it. So she thought about it. Shoulders in. Chin down four degrees. Eyes at turnip height.

She was very good at it now.

She hated that she was very good at it.

At the flour stall she waited while a man in front of her counted out in half-pennies and came up short and put the smaller bag back with both hands, carefully, the way you set down something that is not yours.

"Twelve," the flour man said, when it was her turn. Half a kilo.

"Eleven."

"Twelve."

"You said eleven on Fourthday."

"On Fourthday I had four bags."

Pip shifted in the bag against her hip. Fans off — she'd asked it to, in the market, months ago, because ducted fans sound like exactly one thing and that thing is money. Powering back up afterward cost it battery it could not spare. She had never told it she knew that.

She was going to say ten and settle at eleven. She had the coins already warm in her hand.

Then the silo went dark.

It was the tallest flat surface in Ninepenny: the grain silo, empty since the fourth month, with a projection panel bolted to the south face that the Bellows used for shift rosters and ore prices and, on the first, the names. People read it the way people read a sky.

The ore prices went off and did not come back.

The public boards over the stalls cut. The screen in the bar doorway cut. The strip above the clinic door that had scrolled NO TESSAMINE UNTIL 14TH for nine days cut, and for about three seconds there were no words anywhere in Ninepenny at all.

Then everything, everywhere, at once, showed a room.

Pale stone. High windows. Morning light of a kind that did not happen on this planet. A long table with nothing on it — no map, no flag, no glass of water. And a man at the end of it, sitting, hands loose on the wood.

Eliana's hands closed on the bag strap. Inside it: two turnips and a drone with a dying battery.

"Good morning," said Praetor Oris Vantalar.

He had never looked like a soldier. Long courteous face, grey coming in at the temples, the manner of a man who had never in his life needed volume to finish a sentence. Civil dress. No decorations at all.

She knew exactly how much work the no decorations had taken.

"My name is Oris Vantalar. I am Governor-Praetor of the Aetherian Province. Most of you have never heard me speak. I have not wanted to speak until I had something worth your time."

Around her the market stopped. Not dramatically. A man set a crate down instead of dropping it. A woman told a child to hush and the child hushed.

"I am going to make an offer. Once, in plain terms. I am not going to threaten anybody. I would ask you to notice that as I go. There will be no threat in anything I say. If you hear one, it is yours, and not mine."

Look at the flour, she thought.

She looked at the flour. She heard every word.

"First. As of this broadcast all punitive operations across the Reach are suspended. Not reduced. Suspended. The reprisal schedule for Corvane, Ilsedene and the Tarn arc is cancelled. The pacification levies are cancelled. The orders are logged at every provincial office and you may go and read them today." One hand turned, a fraction. "This has already happened. It is conditional on nothing. Consider it the first line of the ledger."

"Second. Amnesty. Full, unconditional, immediate, for every combatant of every resistance cell in this galaxy — including, and I will be precise, because precision is a courtesy — including the one hundred and forty-one persons presently under sentence of death. They will not be tried. They will not be watched. They will be given transit home. If they take up arms again, we will deal with that then. I am not asking anyone to promise me anything."

The bar had turned its screen up. The same voice arrived from three directions with a fractional stagger, so his consonants came doubled, like a room of men agreeing.

"Third. Civil administration returns to Aetherian officers. Your courts, your registries, your grain boards, your clinics — staffed and directed by your own people under your own law, with my garrison in barracks and off your streets. I did not come here to run your post offices. I have discovered that I am extremely bad at it."

Somebody laughed. It was not a cruel laugh. It was the laugh of a person who has been braced for eleven minutes and has to let something out somewhere.

"Fourth." A pause. Short. He was too good for a long one. "The outer-ring supply corridors reopen. All nine. Within thirty days."

The market made a sound Eliana had never heard a market make. Lower than a cheer, and shorter, out of a hundred throats at once, and then gone — because everyone in that square already knew there was a fifth thing.

"I closed those corridors," Vantalar said. "I want that in my own voice so no one has to wonder. Seven months ago I judged them a military necessity and I signed the order and I have read the mortality returns every week since. Kelvar's Reach. Dunmoor. Sabeth Nine." He paused exactly long enough. "Veridus."

He said it the way you say a name you have written down.

"I know what closing a corridor does. I did it anyway. So I will not sit here and call the opening of them generosity. It is the correction of a wound I made."

He said Veridus.

Fourth in a list of four. No weight on it. She knew with total certainty that the placement had been considered for some time.

"Now," said Vantalar. "The price."

"I am asking for the safe return of the Lady Eliana Zadkiel."

Her face did not move. She would like that recorded somewhere, by someone: her face did not move.

"She is twenty-two years old. She is not a soldier. She has never held a rank, issued an order, or fired a weapon. There is no charge against her and there will not be one. I know what the word return does to people, so I will be exact. She will not be a prisoner. She will not be questioned. She will not be tried, held, confined, or displayed."

He turned his hands over on the table, palms up. It was such a small gesture. It was so well chosen.

"She will be married. To me. She will be Consort-Queen of the Aetherian Province, with a household of her own naming, an income independent of mine, and the legal standing — codified, filed, unrevokable by my office — to intercede in any provincial matter she chooses. Against me. In public. And be heard. If she elects to spend her entire life countermanding me, she will find she is able to."

A woman near Eliana said, to nobody, "Physicians."

As though he had heard her: "She is ill. Verrine decay. Her people were told nothing could be done, and in the Reach that was true. I have physicians from twelve galaxies and they have already read her file. They will not cure her. Two of them believe they can give her years."

He let that sit for the exact width of it.

"I am aware this is the part people will call cynical. I would only say that a man who wanted a trophy would not ask for one that is dying."

The flour man had both hands flat on his counter and his mouth slightly open. Four teeth gone on the left side. Eliana had bought from him for seven months and had never seen that, and saw it now, and would have it for the rest of her life.

"There are people who will tell you this is a hostage in a wedding dress," Vantalar said. "I cannot stop them and I will not insult you by trying. So let me finish with something that will sound strange, and is true, and which I do not intend to explain."

He looked up.

He had been addressing the middle of the table the entire time. Now he looked into the lens, and the lens was very good, and on the south face of a grain silo on Veridus-9 his eyes were a metre across.

"Three years ago, at a reception on Halcyon, I made this young woman an offer of an entirely different kind, and I made it badly. She refused me in one sentence. She told me she did not believe in a love that arrives with a ledger."

Someone laughed — short, delighted, involuntary.

It was the first time Eliana had heard a stranger laugh at something she had said.

"She was correct," Vantalar said. "It was a small ledger. A trade attaché's ledger, with almost nothing in it, and she was right to hand it back to me." His voice did not rise. It got gentler. "I have spent a year building a larger one. It is on the table in front of you. Nine corridors. One hundred and forty-one condemned. A galaxy's courts returned to its own hands."

He tilted his head, very slightly.

"Lady Eliana. I would like you to come and inspect it."

Then he stopped. He nodded once to the lens, the way you acknowledge someone across a room, and the image cut.

And her face came up on the silo.

The Concord Winter Reception portrait. Three years old. Her feet had hurt and Leon had stood behind the photographer making a face at her the whole time.

Two metres tall on corrugated steel.

The hair was down, lit from behind so that it read less like hair than like something in progress. The violet had been warmed a little. Her chin was up. There it was — the tilt, the four degrees she had spent seven months cutting out of herself — printed enormous above a market that had run out of grain.

Under it, in clean provincial type: Nine corridors. One hundred and forty-one. Thirty days.

She was beautiful. She had never been confused about that. It had been a fact about her the way her height was a fact.

Now it had a figure under it.

There was grit in her collar. Her nails were cut to the quick because in this dust long nails went black underneath. The portrait had a pearl at its throat.

Week three. Ninety marks.

Three weeks of Tessamine and a coat for Leon.

Nobody looked at her.

That was the part she had not prepared for. She had braced for the square to turn, and the square turned to each other instead, and began, quite calmly, to talk it through.

"Thirty days," the flour man said. He said it to her, because she was in front of him. "Thirty days on the corridors. That's before the cold turn."

"Yes."

"That's flour at six."

"Yes."

He nodded slowly and went back to the silo. He had not registered speaking to her at all.

Behind her, two women.

"He gave the first four away for nothing. You notice? He never said if. He said it's done."

"That's the trick of it—"

"I know it's the trick of it. I'm saying he still did it. My cousin's boy is in the Tarn arc. He was on the reprisal list. He was on the list, Nera."

Silence between them, long enough to be an answer.

"Then I hope it's true," said Nera.

At the standpipe — everyone called it the fountain; it was a pipe and a stone basin — a woman sat with a child either side of her and one against her chest, working sums on her fingers.

Eliana knew her from the bread queue. She bought at the end of the day when it dropped to 0.3, and she bought four, and that was four days.

"It's not right," the woman said.

"No," said the man next to her.

"It's not right and I've had four minutes to think about it and I want them to do it." She said it evenly. "I've been giving them bread. That's the whole of it, since spring. Bread, cut thin, and Tomas has stopped asking for more. That's the bit I can't—" She stopped. "He used to ask."

The man looked at the ground.

"So somebody tell me why one girl who's already got everything is worth more than three of mine."

"She's ill. They said she's ill."

"They said he's got twelve galaxies of doctors."

"Aye."

"Twelve galaxies, Ren." The woman laughed, and it was the worst sound in the market. "I've got Sabine Orr and a machine older than I am. Don't talk to me about her being ill."

Eliana had the coins in her hand. She did not remember picking them up.

Two men in mine coveralls stood at the end of the row, grey to the elbow, helmets under their arms.

"I'll say this," said the older one. "I wouldn't hand over a girl. I want that said out loud. Somebody comes to my door with a girl in a cart, they go back in the road."

"Aye."

"I wouldn't do it." He scratched his jaw with the back of his thumb. Corrin Vale. She knew the name because Garren swore at him amiably across the market about once a week, and because she had seen him carry his smallest one on his shoulders past the shrine, and had liked how he did it. "Only — what's she for, though?"

"Corrin."

"I'm asking honest. I'm not being clever about it." He turned the helmet in his hands. "She's not a general. She's not an engineer. She's a lady at a party — that's the whole of what I know. Her father did what he did and her father's dead. So she's the last one, and she's a sick girl who can't work, and I'm stood here being told she's worth nine corridors."

"That's how you know it's a trap. Nobody pays that."

"Then what's he buying?"

"The name."

"Then he can have the name." Vale laughed. There was no malice anywhere in it. "God, he's welcome to it. I've never eaten a name."

Out of the light, under the sheet, a man with a shrine-keeper's rag knotted round his wrist, talking to three younger ones who were listening the way young men listen when they want permission.

"It's a marriage. Read the words. It's a marriage, not an execution."

"It's not a marriage if she doesn't—"

"Then let her say so. Let her say so and I'll shut my mouth for a year." He held both hands up. "But you'll not tell me it's the same as a killing. Half the queens in the histories went for less than a bridge. Ostreth Anna went east over a fishing right. Two counties and forty years of quiet, and she's blessed in every book we've got."

"That's history."

"That's people. Same then. Same now."

"She's twenty-two."

"So was Ostreth Anna."

The last one was two women by the water, and it was the kindest voice in the square.

"I feel sorry for her. Genuinely. I do."

"So do I."

"And if she's who they always said she was, she'll come."

"Mm."

"They told us for twenty years, didn't they. On the feeds. The Zadkiels. First in, last out." She was not bitter. That was the unbearable part; she sounded like she was defending her. "Well. Here it is. Here's the serving. I don't want anybody to drag her. I don't want anybody to lay a hand on her. I want her to volunteer, and I want it written down, and I want her remembered for it as long as there's anyone left to remember."

"And if she doesn't?"

A shrug Eliana felt more than saw.

"Then she was a girl at a party."

A boy of about five, sitting in the dirt by the basin, pointed at the silo with his whole arm.

"Mum. Is the pretty lady going to come?"

His mother had a sack over one shoulder. "Probably not, love."

"Why not?"

"Because she's rich." She hitched the sack and took his hand. "Rich people don't."

Eliana turned around.

She put 1.10 on the counter and left the flour on it and walked. The flour man called after her twice. She raised a hand without turning, which meant keep it, which meant she had paid one mark ten for nothing.

She did not care. She would care at about two in the morning.

The road to Garren's went up between the fabricator sheds and then along the drainage cut, and it was uphill, and she had to stop twice.

That was the arithmetic her body did now. Sixty paces, stop, count to twenty, sixty more. If she pushed it, ten running steps and the world went the colour of the sky here.

She stopped at the cut and put her hand flat on the pipe housing and waited for the grey to go out of the edges of things.

And standing there, she worked it out.

It came the way it came when she was arguing with Leon and saw the end of the argument three moves before he did.

He never once said find her.

That was all of it. She turned it over twice. Nine minutes on every surface in occupied space, and not hunt, not find, not report. No figure for information. No office to go to. No penalty for anyone sheltering her — not one word, and he had drawn attention to the absence of threats. Twice. Sweetly. As a courtesy.

A bounty makes men come for you. Men coming for you can be run from. She had spent seven months learning to be run-from-able. Sixteen pins. Four degrees. Argue about turnips.

He had not put a price on her head.

He had put a price on everybody else's.

Nine corridors and a hundred and forty-one condemned and a galaxy's grain, set down on one side of a table. On the other side, nothing at all — no army, no manhunt, no door kicked in. A room with the light coming into it and an empty chair, and eleven thousand towns exactly like Ninepenny working it through out loud, kindly, in front of her, and arriving at the reasonable answer.

He was not hunting her.

He had made the galaxy hunt her, so that she would walk in on her own to make it stop.

Because he knew she would.

That was what put her weight onto the pipe housing. Not the cleverness. He had known her for one evening, three years ago, over a glass of something, while she was being arch and quick and pleased with herself — and he had gone away and understood her better than she understood herself, and spent a year building a machine out of one fact.

Not her hair. Not her name. Not her father.

That she could not stand to be the reason.

She stood in the road a while with the drainage cut ticking beside her.

Then she straightened the wrap, pushed the pins back where they belonged, brought her chin down four degrees, and went home.

Garren was in the shop doorway with a coupling in one hand, watching the road, which he did not usually do.

"Market busy," he said.

"Yes."

He looked at her for about a second and a half. Bad lungs made his breathing audible in a small space; you always knew where he was.

"Stairs are loose on the fourth again," he said, and went back inside.

Leon came in at seven, filthy.

He came in filthy every day. Mine dust went into the weave and did not come out, so his coveralls were the colour of the road and his hands were the colour of the coveralls, and there was a clean stripe across his eyes where the goggles sat, which never stopped being funny and which she had never once mentioned because he would stop wearing them out of spite.

"Four marks," he said, and laid them down one at a time, like dealing cards. "I have been paid four marks. I am wealthy beyond the dreams of turnips."

"Turnips are point six."

"Point six."

"I got one for point four. It's a third rot."

"Which third?"

"The good one."

He laughed and went to the basin and started the long business of getting the first layer off. His shoulders had changed. Seven months ago he'd had a fencer's build and a scholar's hands; there was a slab across his back now that rock had put there, and it did not look like health. It looked like something that had been done to him.

She had a speech. She had built it on the hill and it was very good and it began he made a broadcast today and ended somewhere she could not see.

"Sabine says the fourteenth for the Tessamine," she said instead.

"I know. I've got twenty-two put by." He was scrubbing his forearms. "Thirty-one by the eleventh, unless the pump on three floods again, in which case thirty-one by the thirteenth and I'll be extremely annoyed about it."

"Leon."

"Mm."

"Nothing."

He looked up. Water and grey running off his elbows. He looked at her a beat too long, and she watched him decide not to ask, and watched what the decision cost him, which was more than he thought it showed.

Then he wiped his face. "You've got dust in your collar again."

"I have dust in my spine."

"That's the cardigan. That cardigan isn't clothing, it's a filtration system." He straightened up, entirely deadpan. "You know, Eli. One day you're going to put on real clothes. Actual clothes. With a fastening. And on that day — that day — we will convene, as a household, and discuss whether to begin treating you like an adult."

It landed where it always landed. It had never once been funny and it was the funniest thing in the galaxy.

She laughed.

She got the front of it out on breath she already had — that was the trick — and then had to take air in the middle, and taking air in the middle of a laugh is where it goes wrong, so she finished it as a snort and put her hand over her mouth and rolled her eyes at him. He read it as you are an idiot and not as I am holding my face on with my hand.

Three seconds. Maybe four. It cost her everything the hill had left her.

"There it is," Leon said, satisfied, and turned back to the basin.

She sat down on the bed because her legs were finished.

Real clothes.

She had seen today, two metres tall, exactly what real clothes looked like on her. Pearl at the throat. Chin up. A household of her own naming.

"Point four on the turnip, though," Leon said to the wall. "That's genuinely good. That's a nine percent saving on the vegetable line. We should put you in charge of the vegetable line."

"I am in charge of the vegetable line."

"Then the vegetable line is in excellent hands."

She lay awake.

Pip settled on the sill and dimmed itself to nothing, which it did so as not to wake her, and did not know she was never asleep when it did it.

Below, Garren's two measures went down onto the workbench. One. Then the other. Then nothing. He always stopped. She had never seen him take a third and had begun to find it steadying in a way she could not have explained to anyone.

In the dark she did what she always did. Tonight the numbers were different.

Eleven thousand in Ninepenny. She did not know the population of the outer ring; she had never had to know. Kelvar's Reach was bigger than this. Dunmoor was much bigger. Sabeth Nine had had a shipyard. Nine corridors, and if Veridus was one world on one corridor, and each corridor carried four worlds, or six—

She was not Leon. She could not run it to three places and then despise herself for the rounding. She could only do it the way she could do it, which was in people.

The woman with the sack, and the boy who asked.

Tomas, who had stopped.

Three children belonging to a man who did not want anybody handing over a girl and wanted to know what she was for.

Four teeth gone on the left side of a flour man who had said thirty days to her like a prayer and had not seen her face.

One hundred and forty-one people in cells who had been given a date and had now been told there was no date.

Hessa Kade's sister. Corridors.

She turned onto her side. Thirty kilos; the mattress barely registered it.

Thirty days. Four weeks and two days. Say they opened on the twenty-ninth and the first bulk grain came in on the thirty-first and bread went from 0.3 to whatever bread costs on a world that is fed. Say a mother got four days out of a mark instead of one.

Tonight, none of that. Tonight the number was zero.

It was zero because of a decision she had not made yet.

That was the place she kept arriving at and could not walk back from. Not they will starve if I refuse. Quieter than that, and worse. Every meal that failed to happen across nine corridors from tonight onward would fail to happen in the space where her answer was supposed to be. He had built it so that her not answering was the thing doing the harm. Every hour she lay here with her mouth shut was an hour of it.

Lying still, in a rented room over a mechanic's shop, twenty-two marks a month, she was costing people food.

He is so much better at this than I was ready for.

Through the wall Leon coughed twice in his sleep. He had started that in month five. She had asked Sabine about it and Sabine had said lattice dust, and then had said he's twenty-four, in a tone that was not reassurance.

Eliana found the signet on her thumb with a fingertip and turned it so the sunburst sat where it belonged. Then, after a moment, turned it back.

She did the sum again.

She got a different answer, because she had counted Tomas twice.

She kept the wrong one. It was smaller.

The notice went up at first bell, on the shrine wall and the clinic door and the shutter of the bar. Real paper. Somebody had been paid to bring paper to a world that had not seen any in two hundred years, and that was the part Eliana understood first.

PROVINCIAL VERIFICATION SWEEP 14-B. ALL RESIDENTS OF THE NINEPENNY SETTLEMENT WILL PRESENT FOR IDENTITY VERIFICATION AGAINST PROVINCIAL RECORDS. COMMENCING 06:00. NON-ATTENDANCE WILL BE RECORDED AS DECLINATION.

She read it twice. It was the last word that did the work.

Not refusal. Refusal was a thing with a punishment attached, and a punishment was a thing you could decide to accept. Declination was a box left empty. A sum that had come out wrong and would be corrected later, at leisure, by someone with your address.

Leon had gone down at four.

Nine hours, six hundred metres of rock, four marks. There was no way to send word down that did not go through the shift office, and the shift office did not stop the cage for anybody who was not already dead. He would come up at one with grit in his eyelashes and his hands hanging and no idea at all.

So she stood in the cold outside the shrine and did the arithmetic she was capable of, which was not his kind but was good enough for this.

Six shifts this week, twenty-four marks. Three days on the sorting shed at one and a half, four and a half. Twenty-eight and a half in.

Tessamine was thirty-one.

Rent was twenty-two a month, due in nine days, and Garren had not asked and would not ask, which was worse than asking. The clinic ledger said forty-seven and had said forty-seven for a while because Orr had stopped writing new numbers in it, which was a kindness Eliana had decided not to notice out loud.

They had agreed on five doses a week instead of seven.

She took four.

All right, she thought. All right.

She went back up the stairs to the room and started getting ready.

The blacking was tailings ochre off the pile behind the sorting shed. Free. Nothing that came out of the Bellows was worth stealing.

She worked it into her scalp with both hands, wet, and then dry, and then wet again, until the silver went the dull rust-brown of every third head in Ninepenny. Then she did the roots a second time, because the roots were what people looked at, and she had watched a woman at the water queue get called out for a bad dye job by a stranger who had only meant to be friendly.

Her hands came away orange to the wrist. She left them.

The cardigan was the secondhand one. Two sizes wrong. Third stall, second row, four marks eighty, and Leon had haggled the woman down from six with a story about a dead uncle that had made both of them laugh, and had handed it over without looking at her, and had gone and stood by the cable stall for a minute afterward.

It had been white for about nine days.

She rubbed dust into the collar and the cuffs and the front, evenly, the way you salt something. Then she scuffed the toes of her sneakers on the doorframe until the rubber went grey.

Pip hovered at her shoulder, fans thin and high, tracking her hands.

"You're coming," she said. "You're coming off."

She powered it down. It went quiet and heavy in her palm the way it always did, like a bird that had stopped in her hand, and she put it in the bread bag with the empty tin and the heel of yesterday's loaf. It ticked twice as it cooled. She could still hear it on the second step down.

Then she stood in the middle of the room, in front of nothing, and practised.

The walk first. Not a limp. A limp was a thing people described afterward. A short stride, weight sitting a half-beat too long on each foot, shoulders rolled in, chin out and down. The walk of somebody who had carried loads for a living and had got used to low ceilings.

Then the voice. Flatter than hers. Outer-ring vowels, which lay down and did not get up again. She had listened to the women at the water queue for eight months and could do three of them now, and one of them well.

Then the life.

Nell Vardy. Twenty-four. Older, because nobody was looking for an older woman. Ferrow Cut, corridor township, closed in the second month, records lost in transfer. Leon had picked it for the lost records. He had spliced her into a provisional registry two months ago off intercepted traffic and a clerk key he had not explained the source of, and he had walked her through it once, fast, in the flat voice he used when he was frightened, and had not made a single joke the entire time.

Father, Tomas Vardy, corridor hand, roof fall at Ferrow six years back. Mother gone before that. Raised by her grandmother.

Ada Vardy.

She had built Ada out of nothing across four evenings and had built far too much of her. Ada had hands like tree roots. A stove that smoked. A way of scraping the burnt fat off the pan and eating that part herself. Ada said don't let it stand about everything — milk, water, arguments. Ada had a bad hip and a good temper and a tin of buttons she would not let anybody sort.

Four evenings, and she had not been able to stop, and halfway through she had understood why.

It was easier to invent a woman she loved.

She could describe Ada Vardy for ten minutes without pausing.

Some mornings she could not remember what her mother's voice sounded like doing anything other than trying to breathe.

"Nell Vardy," she said aloud, flat, lying down. "Ferrow Cut."

Right the first time.

At the door she stopped and took the signet off her thumb.

It was her mother's. It would not stay on any other finger. She had worn it eight months and had turned it a thousand times without deciding to, so that the sunburst rode on the back of her hand where a knuckle should be, and she had told herself that was accidental.

She looked at the loose board. The gap behind the water pipe.

She put it back on her thumb, spun the sunburst under into her palm, and closed her hand around it.

Stupid, she thought, and went down.

Garren was under the flatbed with a lamp on his chest and one boot out in the aisle. The compressor cycled. He did not come out.

"Queue's past the shrine already," he said.

"I know."

"Stool by the door if you want to carry one. They won't let you sit on it. You can carry it."

"I'm fine."

The lamp moved. He came out on the board far enough to look at her, and his eyes went over the rust-orange hair, and the dusted cardigan, and the orange to her wrists, and stopped nowhere in particular for about a second and a half.

Two hundred and sixteen years of not saying things sat in the shop with them.

"Right," Garren said, and went back under.

She went early. Not first — first was a thing people remembered. Early, while the clerks were fresh and bored and processing fast, before the queue had time to turn into a story anybody would tell later.

By seven it was eleven hundred people standing in the dust.

The line started at the market and ran out past the shrine and doubled back along the drainage cut, and it did not move so much as compress and release, like something breathing badly. They had put the booth under the solar sheet at the head of the second row, where the stalls usually sold cable and boots. Two clerks. A folding table with a bad leg propped on a shim of ore. A grey pillar with a glass plate and a lens at eye height, running off a portable cell that somebody had to swap twice before noon.

Four guards in Dominion field grey. One at each corner. Weapons slung across their fronts, hands resting on them the way you rest your hands on a table in somebody else's kitchen.

Nobody shouted.

That was the thing she had not prepared for. She had braced for doors and boots and voices, because that was what the fall had been and her body had learned nothing else in eight months. But the clerks said good morning, and the guards said nothing, and the queue went forward at ninety people an hour, and the whole apparatus had the exact texture of a licence office in a town too small for one.

She worked out inside the first hour why that was worse. If they had come kicking, Ninepenny would have hidden things.

They came with a table, so Ninepenny queued.

She stood between a man with a cough and a woman holding a child too old to be carried.

The dust got in at her collar. The light was the long brown of a Veridus morning, which lasted most of the day and never committed to anything, and there was nothing to look at but the backs of people and the sheet overhead and the wall of the sorting shed.

And the poster.

They had put it up in the fourth month and refreshed it in the seventh. It faced the market square. The market square was where the queue was.

So for six hours she stood in the dust and looked at her own face.

Two metres of it, lit from the left. Silver-white hair loose because it had never stayed in anything. Pale violet eyes. The small careful mouth of a girl who had been asked to hold still and had been holding still ever since. Underneath, in three languages:

THE LADY ELIANA ZADKIEL. HER SAFE RETURN. THE CORRIDORS OPEN. ALL SENTENCES REMITTED. HER PERSON HONOURED, HER HEALTH ATTENDED, HER VOICE HEARD IN COUNCIL.

No sum.

That was the whole trick. There was no number under her face, because a number made it a bounty, and a bounty was a thing a decent man could be ashamed of collecting.

She counted coughs. She got to forty-one before the woman with the child spoke.

"They opened Sarrow's corridor. That's what I heard."

"They didn't." The man behind, not unkindly. "That's the rumour every month."

"My sister's at Sarrow."

"Then your sister's hungry, same as us."

An old man three places up turned round. One working eye. Both hands wrapped in rag against the cold.

"If they opened the corridors," he said, "flour'd be six a sack again."

"It was two."

"It was two before." He nodded like she had agreed with him. "I'll take six."

The queue moved four metres. The child was put down and picked up again. Somebody near the shrine started an argument about whether the shed would pay the day out for people who were standing here instead of sorting, and it collapsed on its own when nobody could think of anyone to ask.

Then the man with the cough said, in the tone of somebody repeating a thing already settled in his own kitchen:

"She'll be dead by now."

"Who?"

He tipped his chin at the poster.

"Her. Eight months, girl like that." He coughed into his wrist. Wet, unhurried, a working man's cough with a schedule. "Somebody's had her off a ship and sold her twice by now. That's why they keep the paper fresh. Keeps us looking."

"And if she isn't," said the old man.

"Then she should come in."

He said it the way you'd say a wall wanted repointing.

"That's a girl," the woman said. "Twenty-one, twenty-two."

"I've got two under nine and a corridor that's been shut since the second month." He shrugged inside his coat. "I'd walk her up the ramp myself and I'd be sorry the whole way. That's the truth of it. I'd be sorry and I'd still do it."

"They'd not honour it."

"They might."

"They'd not."

"They might," he said again, and that was the end, because there was nothing after it. Nobody in the line was wrong enough to argue with.

Eliana looked at the shed wall.

She had heard the sentence before. In the water queue. Outside the bar, twice. Once from a woman on her knees at the shrine that was dedicated to nobody in particular, asking nobody in particular to make the girl come forward.

It never got easier. It got more reasonable.

That was the part she could not take home. Leon would go white and precise and start listing why the offer was a lie — the ledger of it, the mechanism, the seventy percent of a fleet her father had taken with him and the arithmetic of what Vantalar still needed — and every single reason would be correct, and not one of them put flour at six a sack.

He isn't wrong, she thought, standing in her own shadow, two metres tall, on the wall. That's the problem. Nobody here is wrong.

Twice now, in the dark, she had got as far as working out how she would leave. Not whether. How. Which route, which ore train, what she would put in the note.

She had noticed herself doing it. She had not stopped.

The queue moved. She moved with it. Short stride, weight a half-beat too long, chin down.

Six hours. She did not eat the heel of bread in the bag, because Nell Vardy would have eaten hers at dawn.

Her legs began to go at hour four. Nothing dramatic. A softening behind the knees, a hum coming up in her ears, the standard cost of standing.

She let it happen. She was going to need it.

The booth smelled of hot plastic and other people.

"Plate. Hands flat. Look at the lens."

The clerk was young. Twenty-two, twenty-three. Off-world, provincial service, grey collar, a stylus he clicked against his teeth without knowing he did it. He had processed five hundred people since six and had the face of a man who had stopped seeing any of them somewhere around two hundred.

Behind him, at the table corner, a guard stood with his weight on one hip and his eyes in the middle distance.

Eliana put her hands flat on the glass. Her thumb went down with the signet under it, the sunburst a small round pressure in her palm.

The lens brightened. Warm on her face. She kept her eyes in it and let them water, because everybody's watered.

"Name."

"Nell Vardy."

"Settlement of origin."

"Ferrow Cut."

Click. Click.

"Ferrow's closed."

"Yes."

"Date of transfer to Ninepenny."

"Second month. Came on the ore train with the Halloran family, they'll say for me."

"I don't need them to say." Reading, not listening. "Household."

"On my own."

"Employment."

"Sorting shed. Casual. One and a half a day when there's a day."

The pillar made a noise like a small animal settling. Green text came up on his screen and he read it and did not react, because it was the four hundred and ninth green line of his morning.

She had two seconds in which she thought it had worked.

Because that was the joke of the last eight months. The Dominion held the deepest biometric archive in twelve galaxies, and everything they had ever taken from Eliana Zadkiel — the iris record from her accession, the gait file, the vascular map printed at seventeen by a machine in a cold white room on Halcyon — had lived in the civil registry at Aurelion.

Aurelion was slag.

They had burned her records themselves. Ninety minutes. Eleven million other things went with them.

No machine in the Reach could find her now.

Only people.

The clerk looked up.

It was nothing. That was what she would think about afterward, behind the clinic, shaking. It was so nearly nothing at all. He looked up the way you look up when something has moved at the edge of your eye, and his gaze crossed her face and went off it, and came back, and stopped.

The stylus stopped clicking.

Screen. Her. Screen.

"Say the name again."

"Nell Vardy."

He did not write it down.

Don't help him. Clever is the thing he'll remember.

"Look up for me."

She looked up. Chin out, mouth loose, eyes tired. She thought about Ada Vardy scraping the burnt part off the pan, and it did not matter, because he was not looking at her expression.

He was looking at the distance between her eyes.

At the line of her jaw, and the bone under her eye, and the shape her mouth made at rest, and she watched him do it, and watched him not know he was doing it.

He put two fingertips on the console.

He did not press anything. He rested them on the surface beside a key and left them there, and she understood — clearly, without fear yet, the way you read a gauge — that his hand had got somewhere ahead of his mind and was waiting for it to catch up.

"Where did you say."

"Ferrow Cut."

"Ferrow." He blinked. He glanced left, out through the gap in the sheet, across the second row, toward the sorting shed wall and the two-metre face lit from the left. He looked back at her. His throat moved.

"How old are you."

"Twenty-four."

"You don't—" He stopped himself. Wet his lower lip. Turned his hand over on the console and turned it back. "Stay there a moment."

The guard's head came round.

Not fast. That was the detail she kept. No alarm, no shout — a bored man at the corner of a table registering that the clerk's voice had changed pitch, and beginning, without any urgency at all, to turn.

She had about a second and a half.

She had thought about this in the room for eight months the way you think about drowning: uselessly, in loops, at three in the morning. She had a knife she could not use. She had a plan involving the drainage cut that required her to run, and she could run for ten steps before the grey came up her vision like water filling a glass.

Ten steps.

She stopped fighting.

That was all it was. Every hour since she was nine, some part of her had been holding a door shut — pacing her breath, spacing her movements, sitting down before she had to, keeping her heart under the line Orr had drawn on a chart with a fingernail.

She let go of the door.

She locked the breath in her chest and made fists on the glass and pushed. At nothing. Everything she had been rationing for thirteen years, all at once.

Her pulse came up under her jaw like knocking.

Four seconds. Five.

Grey from the edges. The roar. Cold at her hairline. The sweet taste at the back of the throat she had learned at eleven to be afraid of.

More.

The pillar chimed. Somewhere a long way off the clerk said her false name.

Her knees stopped being load-bearing.

She took the table corner with her hip going down. The table went over. The stylus went across the floor. She landed on her shoulder in packed dust.

Then her chest turned inside out.

It folded her in half. Something tore loose that had been holding. She felt the wet arrive before she heard it.

She coughed it onto the console. Onto the plate. Down the front of the cardigan in one long stripe. Onto the back of the clerk's hand, which had come out to catch her.

She knew the sound she made.

She had asked four times, through the glass, what it was.

The clerk pulled his hand back so hard his elbow hit the pillar.

"Off — get her off —"

Then the room came apart, and she was on the floor and could not see properly, and it took about four seconds.

Somebody screamed and stopped, embarrassed. Somebody said blood. Somebody out past the sheet said the word she had been counting on, the one that had run through the outer ring for two hundred years and had never once needed evidence:

"Contagion."

Then everybody said it.

The guard stepped back. Not forward. His boots went from one metre to three, and his muzzle came up not at her but across, herding the queue, and he said something in Kaelic that clearly meant stay back and clearly meant I am staying back.

"Get her out of the booth—"

"She's not processed, she's not—"

"She's bleeding on the plate—"

"That's the lung. My uncle went like that—"

"That's not lung, that's wet rot, you can smell wet rot—"

"Get her out."

Hands took her under the arms.

Ninepenny hands. Not Dominion. That was the part she would carry behind the clinic afterward and would not be able to put down. It was the woman with the child, and the old man with the rag on his hands, and the boy from the sorting shed she had said good morning to eleven times. They dragged her out through the gap in the sheet by her elbows and her collar with their faces turned away and their mouths shut, and one of them said sorry the whole way, on a loop, like a man counting.

They put her in the dust twenty metres out, past the shrine. They let go fast. They wiped their hands on their coats.

Then they went back to the queue.

Because the queue was still moving. The clerk sprayed the plate and the console out of a can and put on the gloves he should have been wearing since six, and called the next number, and eleven hundred people shuffled forward, because non-attendance would be recorded as declination.

Nobody wrote down Nell Vardy.

Nobody wrote down anything.

She got behind the clinic on her hands and knees, then on her feet, then on her hands and knees again.

There was a strip of ground back there between the wall and the fence where the sharps drums stood, out of the wind, out of sight. She had used it before, in the bad week in the fifth month. It smelled of disinfectant and rust.

She sat with her back against the wall.

Her heart was doing something wrong. Not fast — uneven. A stumble every fourth or fifth beat, like a man going down a staircase in the dark. Her hands had gone the colour of the sky. Her sight came back grainy, with a bright flaw in the left that swam when she moved her eyes, and she knew from thirteen years of this that the flaw would sit there two days and might sit there for good.

A month of damage. Ninety seconds.

She knew the figure exactly. She had spent her whole life learning the exchange rate of her own body. A month. Possibly two. On Thirdday Orr would look at the readout and go quiet and then get brisk, and would ask what she had been doing, and Eliana would say nothing, and Orr would write attrition, which is what it was.

Two years, Orr had said in the third month, with her hand flat on the desk. Maybe two.

She had just spent some.

She got the bread bag open with fingers that would not close and woke Pip.

It came up off her lap and hung there. Its sensor ring went round twice.

Then it started.

Three rising tones. A pause. Three rising tones.

"Stop."

Three rising tones. A pause. Three rising tones.

"Pip. Stop it."

It circled her head and dropped to chest level and put its light on her mouth, on the orange dust, on the long dark stripe down the front of the cardigan, and chimed again, louder, because that was what it had been built to do by people who had assumed somebody would be coming.

"There's nobody to call," she said. "There's nobody to call, you idiot—"

Three rising tones. A pause. Three rising tones.

And then she was laughing.

It came up out of the same torn place as the blood and cost exactly as much, and she could not stop it, and she could not stop shaking either, and after a while the two ran together and she could not tell which was which. Arm across her stomach. Head back against the clinic wall. A noise like a hinge.

Because she had done it.

Governor-Praetor Oris Vantalar had put her face on every public surface in occupied space. He had offered the Reach amnesty, administration, the corridors, flour at six a sack. Courteously. On camera. Without one threat in the whole eleven minutes of it. He had made eleven thousand hungry people in Ninepenny into his hands and his eyes, and they had queued for six hours in the dust to be his eyes, and had been sorry about it, and had done it anyway.

And she had beaten all of it.

Not with a ship. Not with Leon's arithmetic, or her father's name, or the thing in a crate under a dead observatory that neither of them said out loud in the room.

She had beaten it by holding her breath until the disease came out of her mouth. By being, for four seconds, so disgusting that an empire took its hand back.

I'm the most valuable object in the galaxy, she thought, hiccupping, wiping her chin with the back of her orange hand, and they hauled me out by the elbows and wiped their hands on their coats.

The laugh turned over into something else partway through. She let that happen too. Fist against her mouth. About a minute.

Then she stopped, because there was no time.

Pip chimed.

"I know. I know. Come here. Off."

It would not go off. It hovered. It dimmed its lights, which it did at night so as not to wake her, and which there was no reason on any world to do at eleven in the morning, and she looked at it a moment and then put her hand flat and let it settle into her palm. Humming. Warm. Its cell down to a quarter and no cell like it within four jumps.

"You," she said, "are going to run out of battery on this planet, and I am going to be extremely rude about it."

The bucket was behind the shop by the cistern. The water in it was boot water.

She got the cardigan off and put it in and worked the front of it with the flat of her hand, because there was no soap that could be spent on this — soap was point four a cake and they bought one a month — and because a brush would take the nap off and make it obvious.

The blood came out grey. Then pink. Then it stopped coming out.

She changed the water twice. Somewhere over at the Bellows the second-shift siren went, which meant the cage in forty minutes, which meant she had thirty.

She held the cardigan up.

The stripe was still there. Paler. Rust-brown on dust-brown, running from the collar down past the third button, in the shape of exactly what it was.

She put it back in the water and did it again anyway.

She was still doing it when Leon came round the corner of the shop with his hood down and his face black to the cheekbones and his hands hanging.

He stopped.

He looked at her kneeling in the dirt in her undershirt in the cold, arms in a bucket to the elbow, hair stiff and rust-orange, at eleven in the morning on a day when eleven hundred people had queued in the market.

He looked at the bucket.

He looked at the cardigan in her fists, and the stripe on it, and he took one breath and held it a fraction longer than a breath needs holding.

"I spilled something," she said.

Three seconds. Maybe four. The cistern dripped. Garren's compressor cycled in the shop. A dog barked somewhere past the drainage cut and gave up.

"Right," Leon said.

He crouched down beside her, groaning like an old man, and put his hands in the freezing water next to hers, and started wringing out the sleeve.

Corrin Vale carried her water once.

Fourth month. Before the requisition, before the portraits, back when the worst thing in Leon's week was the arithmetic. The standpipe at the top of Ninepenny ran forty minutes on a good day — the water was free and the queue was the price — and the cans held twenty litres, and Eliana had gone up the hill because she had decided that morning to be useful and would not be talked out of it.

She got eleven steps back down before her hands stopped working.

Not dramatically. Her fingers opened. The can went over. The water went into the dust and the dust took it the way it took everything, instantly, without leaving a mark, and she stood there looking at the place where it had been.

Vale was three back in the line. He picked up the can, filled it out of his own turn, and walked it down the hill and put it on the step of Garren's shop.

"Slope's bad there," he said. "Gets everyone."

The slope was nothing. It was a lie, and it was the kind of lie a man tells so a girl does not have to say anything, and then he went back up the hill to stand at the end of forty minutes again.

Leon learned his name that week and filed it, because he filed everything.

Corrin Vale. Forty-four. Three children — a boy of nine, twin girls of six. Corridor freight handler, eleven years, until the corridors closed, which meant he owned a skill that no longer existed on a planet that had never needed it. He queued at the Bellows gate at half five every morning with sixty-odd men for eleven casual slots. He got picked twice a week if the picking was fair. Four marks a shift. Eight marks a week, into a household of five, in a town where bread was three-tenths of a mark and a room was twenty-two a month.

He was not a drinker. He was not loud. He fixed people's door seals for nothing, because he was good at it and because a man out of work needs his hands occupied or he starts coming apart at the shoulders.

Leon liked him.

That was the whole of the difficulty, afterward. Leon liked him from the first week and never stopped, not once, not even at the end.

The requisition went up in month seven. By month nine it had stopped being news and become weather.

Her face was on the east wall of the grain silo. Two metres tall, printed on Dominion sheeting that did not fade, did not tear, and had been mounted at a height nobody could reach without a ladder Ninepenny did not own. In the portrait she was seventeen. Some collar, some reception, her chin turned a few degrees off camera at whoever had just made her laugh.

They had chosen it well. They had chosen it viciously well.

Under the picture, in Reach standard and in Kaelic: corridors reopened, amnesty full and unconditional, civil administration restored to Aetherian officers. And the last line, the one Leon had read perhaps nine hundred times and still could not get to lie flat in his head — elevated, not held. Consort-Queen of the Aetherian Province. Physicians drawn from twelve galaxies.

Men argued about it at the gate the way they argued shift allocation.

He had heard a woman at stall two say she would carry the girl to the garrison herself if she had the back for it. He had heard the man beside her call that a foul thing to say. He had heard the woman answer that her son was nine and weighed what a six-year-old weighed, and the man had not said anything else, because there was nothing to say that was true.

Eliana bought turnips under that silo. Four for a mark, two of them soft. Sixty centimetres of hair crammed up into a cap, hood over it, head down, eight steps and a rest, eight steps and a rest.

She never once asked him to take the picture down.

She never once looked at it, either.

Vale came to the shop at the eleventh hour, after the market shutters came down, when Garren had gone up to his room and the sky had stopped pretending.

Leon was in the bay with the lift arm of a hauler in pieces across the bench. The shop paid him two marks an evening. Two marks was two-thirteenths of a week of Tessamine, and he had learned to think in thirteenths.

He heard the boots on the yard grit. He knew the boots.

He kept working.

"Leon."

"Corrin."

"Can I come in."

He was already in. Leon set the spanner down flat on the bench and turned around, and the first thing he saw was that the man had shaved.

At eleven at night. In a town where washing cost forty minutes of standing. He had scraped his jaw clean to come and have this conversation, and Leon understood, precisely then, how the next ten minutes were going to go.

"Sit down," Leon said.

"I'd rather stand."

"Sit down, Corrin."

He sat on the coolant drum. He put his hands between his knees. They were shaking, and he was arranging his shoulders to make it look like cold.

"I know who your sister is."

The compressor cycled in the corner. Forty-one seconds on, then ninety off. Leon had counted it for two hundred nights.

"Say the rest," Leon said.

Vale nodded several times, fast, a man agreeing with an instruction he had given himself on the walk over. "I want to say something first. I haven't been to the garrison. I could have gone three weeks ago and I didn't, and I want that between us, on the record."

"It's on the record."

"Right." He wet his lips. "Her hair. Month five, at the pipe. Her pin came out and I saw about that much." Thumb and finger, four centimetres. "That's not a dye you can buy here. That's not a colour that happens to people."

"Women bleach."

"Not to that. Not white-blue at the root, and not at the root when the rest of it's the same." Vale looked at the floor. "Then it was the change. Stall four. The woman took two-eighty for two rows of stuff and your sister said you owe me forty before she'd finished stacking it. Before. Not after. I've watched her do it eleven times. She adds up five prices while the man's still picking things off the table and then she doesn't check it. She never checks it. My boy can't do that, and my boy isn't stupid."

"She's good with numbers."

"Nobody's good with numbers like that." He said it without heat, which was worse. "There's a machine in your room. Small. Fans on it, like a wasp shut in a jar. It goes off at night sometimes. Three tones, gap, three tones."

"You've been under our window."

"I sit on the back step some nights because I can't sleep in a room with four other people breathing in it." Vale's jaw worked. "I know how that sounds. I'm not proud of any of it."

"Finish."

"The ring." He looked up. His eyes were wet and he was not crying, which was the least bearable of the options available. "She wears it on her thumb. It won't stay anywhere else, so it turns. Second week after they put the picture up, I was in the queue and she came past me and it had turned round, and there's a sunburst on it. Eight points. Long one at the top." He moved his hand vaguely toward the wall, the town, the east face of the grain silo. "Same as the one on her collar. In the picture."

The compressor cut. In the quiet the shop ticked as it cooled.

"So," Vale said.

"So," Leon said.

Here is what Vale said next, as near as Leon could ever reconstruct it, and he could reconstruct anything.

He said he had three children. He said the boy was nine and had not grown in a year, and Doctor Orr had told him it was nothing to worry about yet, and that yet was a word he had started hearing in his sleep. He said the twins had learned to ask for food in a particular quiet way, and that he could not describe the way and could not stop hearing it.

He said the corridors had been shut two hundred and eighty-one days.

He said that when they opened, freight came back, and freight meant handlers, and he was a handler — a good one, eleven years, no incidents — and there would be work inside a month, and work meant everything.

"There's a consideration," he said. He said it like a word somebody had left in his mouth.

"How much."

"Nine thousand. To the household that returns her. And papers off-world for the family." He got that out and then hurried past it. "That's not why."

Leon watched him hear himself.

Watched him understand that he had, some evening in the last three weeks, sat at a table and worked out what nine thousand marks came to in weeks of food, and that a man does not carry a number like that around by accident.

Then Vale said the thing.

"It isn't even a betrayal." He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, earnest, and the earnestness was the horror of it. "That's what I keep — listen. If it was a bounty I'd cut my hands off first, you know that. If they were going to hurt her. But they're not. She'd be a queen. She'd have doctors, twelve galaxies of them, and she's not well, Leon. Anyone with eyes can see she's not well. She can't get up the hill to the pipe."

"No."

"You're killing yourself to buy her medicine that doesn't fix it. Thirty-one a week, I asked. I've seen you go into the Bellows at six and come here after and work till one, and that's four and two, that's six on a good day, and thirty-one's thirty-one." His voice did something at the edges and he pushed through it. "You'd be handing her to people who could actually make her better. And every corridor in the outer ring opens the same day."

"And the amnesty," Leon said.

"And the amnesty. Every fighter they've got in a cell, walking out." Vale nodded. "All of it. It's all true, isn't it. That's the thing. It's all true."

"It's all true."

Vale's hands had stopped shaking. That was the moment they stopped.

"I'm not squeezing you. I don't want your money, you haven't got any, I know exactly what you haven't got." He spread his palms, which was the closest he came all night to asking for anything. "I want you to talk to her. That's all. You're her brother. She'd listen to you. It comes from her, and it's her choice, and then nobody sold anybody."

Leon said nothing.

"I'll come back tomorrow night. Same hour." Vale stood. "That's a day. I think a day's fair."

He got as far as the bay door and turned round, because he was a decent man, and decent men cannot leave a room like that cleanly.

"She gave one of my girls her bread," he said. "Second month. Half of it. I made her give it back."

Then he went out into the dust.

Leon stood in the bay a while and ran it.

Pay him. Six marks in the tin behind the loose board. Twelve days of Tessamine in the drawer, four of them already spent in advance against Thursday. The Aureate ring was gone in week two — two hundred and forty marks, eight weeks, eaten. There was nothing left in the room that would sell for more than a coat. Nine thousand marks was two thousand two hundred and fifty shifts. Six years underground without eating anything at all. Closed.

Move. Nineteen days of medication if he stretched it, and he could not stretch it, because stretching it in month six had put her on the floor with her lips gone the colour of the walls. No ship left Ninepenny without logging at the port office. Four Dominion-manifested freighters a season. She could not walk two kilometres. She could not stand up quickly. Meridian-7 was eleven jumps and he had none of them. Closed.

Threaten him. He turned that one slowly, the way you turn a part you already suspect is cracked. Vale had three children, no work, no property, no future, and a wife who had stopped speaking to him about money. There was nothing to take. You cannot lever a man who has already been emptied out. And he had come here first — which meant he still believed this was a conversation between neighbours, and a threat would end that belief, and it would end it in the direction of the crossroads, where the garrison office had one bored corporal and one open channel.

Closed.

Tell her.

He stayed on that one longer than he meant to.

She would say yes. Not immediately. She would go quiet for a day and then ask him three questions, and every question would be about somebody else's children, and then she would say yes. He knew it the way he knew the duty cycle of the compressor. She had spent nine months looking for something she could spend herself on, and the entire apparatus of the occupied Reach had been rebuilt into a machine designed to receive exactly that, and the machine was aimed at a room above a mechanic's shop.

And at the far end of it stood the man who had put a blade in through their mother's back and out under her collarbone.

Closed.

There was a fourth branch. He took about two steps into it, saw the shape of the rest, and stopped, because there was no need to walk it. He already knew what was at the end.

He picked the spanner back up and finished the lift arm. Torqued to spec, forty-two newton-metres, both pins. A job left open in a shop is a thing people remember afterward.

Then he washed his hands, and put on his coat, and went out.

The wind was up. The wind was always up after midnight, coming off the tailings, and you walked with your face turned a quarter left out of habit.

Vale's row was eleven minutes east. Leon did not go east.

He went to the back of the sheds by the settling ponds, because a man who could not sleep in a room with four other people breathing would be out there if he was not on Leon's step, and because Leon had noticed months ago, without any need to notice, that Vale smoked exactly two a night by the ponds and had done since the corridors shut.

The ember was where he expected it.

"Leon? That you?"

"It's me."

"You've thought about it."

"I've thought about it."

Wind, for a while.

"You don't have to stand back there," Vale said, and his voice had gone up about a tone and a half, and Leon understood that whatever was on his face had been legible even in that light, and that the man had worked out the last branch in the three seconds it had taken him.

"Corrin." Leon did not raise his voice. He never raised his voice. "Sit down."

The pond was eight metres deep in the middle and had been swallowing machine parts for sixty years.

He went through the pockets first. That was not conscience, it was procedure: a card, a lighter, four marks and thirty, a folded flimsy with a clinic appointment on it for someone called T. Vale, three weeks out. The marks went in with the rest. He kept nothing.

He walked the conduit two hundred metres back and put it in Garren's scrap bin, third from the wall, where there were eleven other lengths of conduit.

His hands were steady. They had been steady throughout. He noticed that, crossing the yard, the way you notice a gauge reading normal.

It took less time than the walk out there.

He was at the standpipe behind the shop at four, washing his hands for the third time, when the door opened.

Garren Doss stood in it with no light behind him. Undershirt. Two hundred and sixteen years old, breathing through thirty years of lattice dust and a filter he had stopped changing in the spring.

He looked at Leon for a long moment.

He did not ask.

"Boots," he said.

Leon looked down. The left had gone into the sludge to the ankle when he had overreached, and the grey had dried to a grey that was not one of the greys of Ninepenny.

"Off. Both. Coat as well." Garren put out one big hand. "I've a burn cabinet for the oil rags. Runs at nine hundred, it's on the manifest, it runs every Tuesday, and it's Tuesday. What did you use."

"Conduit."

"Where is it."

"Third bin. With the others."

"Good." Something in the old face moved a fraction. "That's good."

Leon gave him the coat. Garren folded it once, neatly, the way a man folds a thing he has folded before, and put it under his arm.

"Nobody saw," Leon said.

"Somebody always saw. Nobody'll say." Garren looked out into the yard. "He's not been picked at the gate in nine days. Men who stop getting picked walk out of here. Four, five times a year. It'll be a week before anyone thinks to put a name in a ledger, and there isn't a ledger."

Leon put his hands back under the tap. The water came at a trickle and tasted of iron even on skin.

"You knew who we were."

"First week." Garren shifted his weight. "You walked past the trainer in my back hangar and you looked at it. Not at the frame. At the shoulder actuator, then the knee, then the head last." A pause. "One other man I ever saw look at a machine in that order."

"You served under him."

"Thirty-one years. Two tours." Garren's mouth stayed flat. "He was a better officer than he was anything else, and he was a hell of a lot of other things."

Leon shut off the tap. The silence after it was enormous.

"Tell me what he'd have done."

Garren took his time. He was not a man who filled a gap to be kind.

"I've done this twice," he said. "In a uniform, with a signature over it and a directorate number, and a man in an office telling me it was necessary. I can still give you both their names and what they had in their pockets." He hefted the coat. "You'll carry his. That's the whole of it. There's no ceremony that takes it off you and there's no argument that does it either, and I'm not going to stand out here at four in the morning and tell you it was right. I won't say it. Don't ask me twice."

"I wasn't going to."

"Good." Garren turned, and stopped in the doorway with his back to him. "That man had three children."

"I know."

"They still haven't got work. Now they haven't got a father." He did not turn round. "Both those are true at the same time and they'll stay true. Keep them in the same hand. Don't put one down."

He went inside.

Leon climbed the outside stairs at twenty past four, and put his hand on the door, and by the time it opened he was somebody else.

She was awake. Of course she was awake; she slept in ninety-minute pieces now and read through the rest of it, with Pip hovering at her shoulder with its lights dimmed to almost nothing, because it had decided months ago that its own glow woke her and nobody had ever told it otherwise.

Eliana sat up in the corner of the mattress with her knees against her chest and the wrong-size cardigan around her like a tent. Six marks, second row, month three, from a woman who had sworn to him it was white. It had been white once. It was Ninepenny-coloured now, and the cuffs came down past her fingers, and she wore it every day.

"You're late," she said, without looking up.

"I'm early. It's tomorrow."

"That's worse."

"That's mathematically identical." He shut the door with his heel and dropped onto the crate. "Shove over, you're taking the whole floor."

"I'm on the bed."

"You're radiating."

She turned a page. Pip drifted six centimetres left to keep the light off the paper, and Leon watched it do it and thought, with the clean part of his mind, forty days on those cells. Fifty if she stops flicking it.

"You've got dust on you," she said.

"I've got dust in my lungs, Ellie. Dust on me is aspirational." He tipped his chin at the cardigan. "Are you sleeping in that."

"Yes."

"You slept in it yesterday."

"It's cold."

"It's a bathrobe with delusions. It's two sizes wrong. You could fit a second person in there."

"Then get in." She still had not looked up. "Coward."

"I'm only saying." He leaned back against the wall and folded his arms. "The day you put on real clothes, we'll consider treating you like an adult."

That got him the look. Pale violet, flat, entirely unimpressed, out of a face that the occupied Reach had been offered a peace treaty for.

"Drop dead," she said.

"Working on it. Nine hours a day."

She snorted, which cost her, and then coughed, which cost her more, and Pip pulsed once and dropped toward her shoulder and she batted it off with two fingers and said stop it and went back to her book. Half a minute later the corner of her mouth was still doing something.

"Sleep," he said.

"Soon."

"Ellie."

"Soon."

He got the blanket off the shelf and lay down on the floor between the mattress and the door, where he had slept for two hundred and forty-one nights, because that was where the door was.

The lamp went out at some point. He did not see her put it out.

He lay in the dark with his forearm over his eyes and listened to her breathe — the small catch at the top of each one, the four-count, the way it evened out when she finally went under — and waited to feel something about Corrin Vale.

He waited a fairly long time.

The ledger was there and the ledger was accurate. Three children. A boy of nine who had not grown in a year. Twins of six. A jaw shaved at eleven at night. A can of water set down on a step in the fourth month without a word said about it. He could produce all of it, in order, at any time. He could produce the man's voice saying it isn't even a betrayal, at pitch, forever.

It sat in him like a figure written on a page. No weight underneath it.

He turned it once more to be certain, the way he would check a torque he had already set. It came back the same. He stopped checking.

Somebody else would work it out. A month, three months. The hair, the change, the ring turning on her thumb. There were eleven thousand people in Ninepenny and every one of them was hungry and every one of them had been shown, two metres tall, in two languages, on the side of a grain silo, exactly what she was worth.

He would be there when they did.

This is what I am now. Not a confession; there was nobody to make one to. An entry. A property of the machine, like a load limit or a coolant ceiling — the kind of number you write down so that you can plan around it correctly.

Then he listened to his sister breathe, and did the arithmetic on the twelve days in the drawer, and slept for ninety minutes.

She went down in the room, which was worse.

Leon had spent eleven months building a private catalogue of the places she might collapse. The market, where four hundred people would turn and look. The water queue. The shrine steps, where the light was good and someone would think to record it. He had walked the route from each one to the clinic and timed it and noted which routes had steps.

He had never done the room. The room was the safe one.

She was at the counter with two cups and the heating plate. The plate drew nine amps and browned the lamp every time it cycled, so the light dipped, and in the dip he heard it.

Not a cry. A body meeting the floor with nothing in the way.

She had not put her hands out. That was the fact he took first and could not afterwards put down. Twenty-two years of reflexes and no hands, which meant she had been gone before she landed.

Four seconds. He crossed the room in two.

Pip came off the shelf with a sound like a wasp in a jar and dropped to hover a hand above her chest, and then it sang — three rising tones, a pause, three rising tones — and did not stop singing, and the fans wound up past anything he had heard from it.

"Talk to me."

It threw the readout onto the wall, because the wall was the nearest flat surface. Core temperature 34.9 and falling. Pulse 143, thready. Oxygen saturation 81. Serum tessamine 0.04 milligrams per litre against a floor of 0.9. Mass 26.8 kilograms.

He looked at the last number for exactly as long as it took to file it. She had been thirty when they landed. He had watched it go 30, 29, 29, 28. He had not seen 26.8.

Her mouth was open a little. Her breath was there. Small, and there.

One of the cups had gone over. Chicory root from the third row, one-tenth of a mark the measure, brewed twice because the second brew was nearly free, and it ran off the counter edge and onto the floor beside her hair and he registered the waste and hated himself for registering it.

He put her hood up first.

That was the thing. That was the order of operations he would think about later on the walk back, and again at three in the morning for weeks: his sister on the floor of a rented room at 81 percent saturation, and the first thing his hands did was pull the hood over her hair, tuck the silver-white back inside with two fingers, and check the seam at the temple.

Then he picked her up.

Twenty-six point eight kilograms. He had carried ore trays heavier than that up the Bellows spine for nine hours and four marks. Those had not been warm. Those had not been breathing wrong against his collarbone.

The stairs from the room were fourteen. He took them in nine.

Four hundred metres from Garren's shop to the clinic. He knew it to the metre. He had paced it in week three and checked it against the survey plat pinned over the parts bench, because a number you had verified was a thing nobody could take off you.

Four hundred metres. His stride under load, 0.71. Five hundred and sixty-three steps.

The dust was up. The dust was always up. The sky over Ninepenny was the colour of an old wrench and the light came in sideways for eleven hours at a stretch and the grit got into seals and teeth and the weave of a white cardigan two sizes wrong.

His boots. That was what he kept.

The left one had split across the ball of the foot in the autumn. He had sealed it with lattice adhesive off Garren's bench, and the seal had gone hard, so the left foot clacked and the right did not. Clack. Scuff. Clack. Scuff. Five hundred and sixty-three times. A new pair at the stall was nine marks and he had priced them twice and walked away twice.

Pip flew at his shoulder the whole way, 0.4 metres out, adjusting for his gait, transmitting on the clinic's open channel in the flat clipped voice it used for strangers. Female, twenty-two, Verrine decay, syncope with hypothermia and hypoxia, saturation eighty-one and falling, four minutes out. Then three. Then two.

People moved. That was Ninepenny — eleven thousand of them, four fatalities a month at the Bellows, and everyone knew what a man running toward the clinic meant. Nobody asked. The woman at the turnip stall hooked her crate aside with her foot to clear his line and said something short and kind that he did not hear.

Her face was on the sheeting behind that stall. Two metres of her, in Concord greys, from a reception four years ago. It had been up since month seven. He had passed it perhaps six hundred times.

He looked at the door.

At thirty metres her hood slipped and he had no hand free, so he tucked his chin and held it down with his jaw.

She weighed less than a fuel cell.

Doctor Sabine Orr came out of a queue in her own corridor at a walk, not a run, and that was the first thing about her Leon ever liked.

"Bay two. On her side. Not her back, she'll aspirate."

Fifty-five, and older than that here, the way everyone was. Grey coming in at one temple only, which he had never worked out. Forearms like a woman who moved patients herself because there was nobody else to do it. Her gloves had been washed. Not new — washed, three pairs at a time in a tray of steriliser cut with distilled to stretch it, and he had watched her do it at the basin after a shift and had understood the clinic's whole budget in about four seconds.

"How long down before you reached her?"

"Four seconds unwitnessed. I heard the fall."

"You heard the fall. Not the wobble."

"There wasn't a wobble."

"There's always a wobble." She had her thumb under Eliana's jaw already and was reading Pip's stream off a slate held between two fingers. "Little machine. Ninety days, not ninety seconds."

Pip gave her ninety days.

The bay was a Corvane 400 and it had been two generations out of date when they landed. The resonance ring wore a hand-turned collar. Leon knew the tool marks on that collar. Garren had cut it on the lathe in the back hangar in February out of a scrap of feed stock, had refused the four marks Orr offered, and had been short with her for offering.

Orr got a line in on the second attempt, which for those veins was good, and hung something warm, and laid the field heater across her, and did four other things in an order that never once went backwards.

Then she stood at the wall readout for ninety seconds and said nothing at all.

"She'll wake," she said. "Twenty minutes. Maybe forty. She'll be cold and stupid for a day."

"Thank you."

"Don't." Orr stripped the gloves, one, then the other, into the tray. "Bay's two marks. Oxygen's separate, that's one more."

Leon had six on him. He counted three out onto the corner of the trolley and she took them without looking at them, which he preferred to any of the other ways she could have done it.

"Corridor," she said. "I've a man out there with a crushed hand who's waited an hour and is going to keep waiting. I'd rather he waited for a reason."

The corridor had two chairs, a window with grit welded into the corner of the frame by four years of nobody, and a miner holding his right hand in his left as though it belonged to someone he was doing a favour for.

He was maybe thirty. Two fingers were wrong. He had wrapped them in a strip cut off his own undershirt and the wrap had gone the colour that told you how long he had been sitting.

"You're Doss's lodger," he said.

"I am."

"That your sister?"

"Yes."

The man nodded slowly, the way you nod when you are working very hard at not moving anything above the wrist. "My cousin's on the second shift with you. Bulkhead crew." A pause. "They open the corridors, you know they'll want six hundred bodies at the port inside a week. Loading. That's five a day, not four."

"I'd heard."

"You take it?"

"I'd take it."

"Everyone'd take it." The man looked at his hand. "I don't hold with what they're asking for it. I want that said. But my sister's got two and the little one's stopped growing out of things." He shifted. The chair leg scraped. "You just say it out loud enough times and after a while it doesn't sound like anything."

Leon said nothing, and the man did not seem to want anything back, and that was the worst part of it, and then Orr came out with the slate and the man went quiet and looked at the floor with the particular manners of a person who knows he is not the emergency.

"I'm going to say the whole of it once," Orr said. "I won't soften it and I won't sit down and put my hand on your arm, because I've done that version. It costs six minutes and at the end of it they still have to hear the same sentence. All right?"

"Yes."

"Good." She turned the slate so he could see it, which nobody had done since Halcyon. "Verrine decay. You know the shape. Cellular attrition, accelerated, roughly linear until it stops being. Standard prognosis, twenty-five."

"Twenty-five."

"That's a Core number. It assumes resonance therapy every six weeks and a specialist who's seen forty cases." She tapped. "Her curve isn't linear any more. It stepped. There."

He looked where her finger was and the arithmetic went through him uninvited, in the voice it always used.

"Month seven."

"Seven into eight. Two, three weeks where her attrition markers do something they hadn't been doing. Then they never come back down to the old line." She looked at him properly for the first time. "That's not a bad patch. That's permanent. What happened in month seven?"

The sweep. Kaelic militia through Ninepenny for nine days, faces checked at the market gate, Eliana in the back of the shop with her hood up and Pip switched to passive. And four of those days he had been down the Bellows on doubles at seven marks a day, because they could not afford for him not to be.

"I don't know," he said.

"You don't know."

"No."

Orr held that a moment and let it go, and he was grateful and did not say so.

"Second thing. The Tessamine's doing less every month. When you landed it was buying you around seventy percent of the theoretical slowdown. It's buying thirty. That's not the drug spoiling. That's her getting worse at using it." She put the slate under her arm. "You'll have noticed you don't get the good weeks."

He had noticed. He kept a column for it. Four good weeks in nine through the spring. One in eleven since the summer. He had told himself it was the dust.

"So say it," he said.

"Two years," said Doctor Sabine Orr. "Give or take. That's the honest middle and I'd rather give you the middle than either end." She did not blink and she did not warm her voice. "On this world, with that box, and with me — less. I'm including myself in the list of things that aren't good enough. I'd rather you heard me do that than worked it out later and thought I'd hidden it."

Leon nodded once.

"What would be enough?"

"Full cellular resonance therapy. Not what that box does — that box maps her, it doesn't treat her. A real bay. Six-week cycles. A matched profile built off Concord archive work on Verrine that exists in three places I know of, all Core-side, all currently administered by people who cut a man's sentence in half on a live feed." One shoulder went up and down. "Halcyon. Auren Vale. Somewhere with power that doesn't sag when a heating plate cycles."

"And none of that is coming."

"None of that is coming," Orr said. "I'm saying it in a whole sentence so you can't go home and build a version of this conversation where it might."

Then he audited her.

He did not raise his voice and he did not stand up. He sat with his forearms on his knees and asked questions, and she answered every one, and it took six minutes, and afterwards he could have written the transcript in order.

Could the dose be raised. Yes, to a point. Above 1.4 milligrams per litre serum it scarred the kidneys, and her kidneys were already carrying more than their share. What would double cost. Fifty-nine a week, not sixty-two — there was a break at the second unit. Was there a synthesis route. Yes; it needed a precursor on the Dominion schedule and a chemist, and the last chemist on Veridus-9 took a berth off-world in the spring and was not coming back. Was there anything on this planet that did what a resonance bay did. No. Was there anything that could be made to. No, and Garren had asked her that in month four, and she had checked before answering him.

Could she be moved. Physically yes, warm and flat, with oxygen. Would she survive a jump. Probably. What did probably mean. Seventy percent. And lower every month.

What had the step in month seven cost, in time.

Orr looked at the slate for a while.

"Eight months," she said. "Maybe ten."

"So without it we'd be talking about three years."

"Without it we'd be talking about three years."

He asked four more. Two about the readout. One about hypothermia thresholds and the safe rewarming rate. One about whether Pip's cell degradation was corrupting the mass figures. It was not. The mass figures were hers.

Then he came to the end of the list.

That was the part he had not planned for. He had a list, and he worked the list, and the list ran out. There was nothing after it. No further question existed anywhere. He sat and looked for one the way you pat down a coat you already know is empty.

Orr did not fill it. She let the silence be the size it actually was.

Down the corridor the miner shifted and the chair leg scraped. The window frame had grit in the corner. The heating element in the wall ticked as it cooled.

Leon counted the ticks. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.

"Thank you for not lying," he said.

"I'd have had to remember it," said Orr, and went to see about the hand.

Eliana woke at 6:20 and was cold and stupid for ten minutes, exactly as advertised, and asked him twice whether he had turned the heating plate off.

Then she came back all at once, the way she did. He watched it happen. The pale violet went sharp and she read the ceiling, and the bay, and the chair, and how long he had been in it, and her face did the small tightening it did when she was preparing to be difficult on purpose.

"You carried me."

"You walked. You were very good."

"Leon."

"Four hundred metres. Five hundred and sixty-three steps. I'd like it noted that I did not stop."

"You're going to end up with a back like Garren's."

"Garren's back is a protected structure."

She smiled. It cost him to get it and he did not let her see the price, because that was the arrangement and he had been keeping the arrangement for eleven months. She got the voice. She got the jokes. Everything else on this planet got the other one.

Then she said, "What did she say?"

"Two years. Give or take. Less here."

He watched her take it. She did not flinch. He had known she wouldn't and had hoped anyway.

"Right," Eliana said.

She picked at the blanket hem. The signet turned on her thumb, the sunburst working round to the back the way it always did, and she pushed it straight with one finger without looking at it.

"I want to say a thing and I want to get to the end of it."

"No."

"You don't know what it is."

"I've known what it is for four months," he said. "You get a particular face. You've had it since the broadcast."

She said it anyway, quietly, because she was the most stubborn organism in the known Reach.

"I could stop all of it. Tomorrow."

He said nothing.

"There's a queue at the ration point every second day. Ninety people in the spring. Three hundred and ten on Tuesday, I counted, because you count things and it's contagious." Her voice was level. "The corridors have been shut eleven months. Ninepenny doesn't grow food. Four freighters a year, and there have been none. Corrin Vale's youngest is four and has the flat look. You've seen it. You know what that is."

"El—"

"I'm not being noble, and I want that understood." The indigo came up at the edges of her eyes, faint. "I'm not being brave and I'm not trying to die. I'm being accurate. One person walks into a Dominion office on this planet and gives a name, and the corridors open, and the punitive operations stop, and every condemned prisoner in the Reach walks out of a cell. That's not a feeling. That's a trade with numbers on both sides. I've been doing them for four months and my side of it is one twenty-two-year-old girl who has two years anyway."

"Give or take."

"Give or take," she agreed.

And she waited for him to argue love, or duty, or what their mother would have wanted, because those were the arguments and she had counters lined up for all three.

Leon did not go near them.

"I'm not going to discuss whether it's right," he said. "It might be. I genuinely don't know. I'm going to discuss whether it's true, because it isn't. You've built it on three bad inputs."

She blinked.

"One." A finger. "You think it's an offer. An offer has a party trying to close it. Vantalar has made no attempt to find you. None. Eleven months, one sweep on this world, and it was routine, and it checked ninety faces out of eleven thousand, and it left. He has a fleet. He has the orbital net. If he wanted a search, there'd be a search."

"So he's—"

"He's not hunting you. He's making the galaxy hunt you, because he knows what you'd do about that." Flat took effort. He kept it flat. "He isn't trying to catch you. He's trying to make you arrive. You've been sitting in a rented room for four months doing his arithmetic and calling it yours."

Her jaw set.

"Two." Second finger. "You think the terms are terms. Terms are a thing that gets enforced. There's no mechanism. No signatory, no arbiter, no Concord left to hold him to any of it. The corridors open and he shuts them again in a year when he needs something, and the amnesty lasts exactly as long as it's cheap. You know the shape of that. You sat through nine hours of Kaelic tariff schedules and came out able to recite them."

"That's not—"

"Three." Third finger. His voice went precise, which was what it did when he was afraid, and she had known him her whole life and would hear it, and he could not help it. "You think there's a throne."

He leaned forward.

"There's a room."

"Leon."

"Good heating. Physicians from twelve galaxies. No handle on the inside. A woman photographed twice a year, and everything else in the sentence is set dressing." He did not look away. "You made a joke at him at a reception and he has spent four years building the reply. A man like that doesn't want a consort. He wants a receipt."

She had gone very still.

"Last input," Leon said. "Then I'll stop."

He had not planned to say it. He had carried it eleven months in a sealed compartment. He opened the compartment, because otherwise she was going to walk into a Dominion office, and he could see her doing it.

"You never asked me what the sound was. After the fourth time."

Her hands stopped on the blanket.

"It was a blade. A Verdict. In under her shoulder blade, out below the collarbone. Through the top of the lung."

"Stop."

"Forty seconds."

"Leon."

"He did it himself. Then he cleaned it and came to the viewport and looked in at you."

She had her hand over her mouth. He hated himself, thoroughly and quietly, and did not stop.

"You want to trade with him, fine. Trade with that. Not with the one on the sheeting behind the turnip stall."

The bay was quiet. Pip had dimmed its lights the way it did and settled onto the pillow like a small white stone.

After a while Eliana said, without looking at him, "The queue is still three hundred and ten people."

"I know."

"You haven't given me an alternative. You've taken this one apart."

"I know that too."

And here it was. The edge of it. Three files on a dead-man channel. A vault under an observatory on a world nobody had thought about in two hundred years. A door that opened to their mother's maiden name in a language six people still spoke. A number, 91.7, that he had looked up on a bad night in week six and had not said out loud since.

He came up to the edge and stopped.

"Give me time," he said.

Eliana looked at him. She looked for a while, and he watched her notice all of it — the stopping, the shape of the space where the rest of the sentence should have been, the fact that her brother, who could not shut up, had shut up.

She was faster than anyone expected. She always had been.

"How much time?"

"I don't know yet."

"Time for what?"

"I can't tell you."

She held it. One second. Two.

"All right," she said.

That was all. She let it go, and lay back, and closed her eyes, and it was the largest thing anyone had given him in eleven months.

"Leon."

"Mm."

"If it turns out to be stupid, I'm going to be extremely unpleasant about it."

"I'm counting on it."

He went outside while she slept.

The step was concrete and the dust had drifted against it in a small grey wave in the shape of the prevailing wind. The Bellows horn went for second shift, three kilometres out, flat and thin by the time it arrived. The sky had gone from wrench to darker wrench, which was evening on a world with a fifty-one-hour day.

He stood there and did arithmetic.

Meridian-7. Eleven jumps on a commercial routing. Four on a bad one. Dominion picket on a nineteen-day rotation — he had that off intercepted traffic in month nine, from the receiver he had built out of a scrapped telemetry mast and a Halo Link he no longer let himself use for anything else. Nineteen days, with a handover window of roughly four hours when the departing picket was outbound and the relief was not yet on station.

Four hours. That was the door.

Then the rest of it, item by item, the way you cost a job.

A hull. Nothing on this planet had a jump coil except the ore lighters and the lighters were company-flagged and tracked. A dead Kestrel in the Ninepenny scrapline with a coil that could be rebuilt: two thousand if the man who owned the scrapline were honest, and he was not, so three thousand four hundred. Reaction mass for four jumps, eleven tonnes at fourteen a tonne: one hundred and fifty-four. Coolant, because a rebuilt coil ran hot and the failure mode was not gradual: sixty. Forged transit codes with a registry echo that would survive a passive scan: six hundred, from a broker at the port who took payment in advance and gave nothing back.

Environmental for two, because she could not be left here and could not stay here. Oxygen. A field heater. Eight weeks of Tessamine at the doubled dose to travel with, at fifty-nine: four hundred and seventy-two.

He totalled it twice. He never trusted a sum he had done once.

Four thousand nine hundred and eighty marks.

Then the other column.

A shift paid four. Six shifts was twenty-four. Nights in Garren's shop, when Garren let him and pretended not to be doing him a favour, added six. Thirty gross. The room was twenty-two a month and he was nine days behind on it. Tessamine was thirty-one and going to fifty-nine, because he was going to raise the dose. Bread at three-tenths, with grit in it, and the grit was in the price too.

In a good week he cleared two marks.

Two a week against four thousand nine hundred and eighty. Two thousand four hundred and ninety weeks. Forty-seven years and nine months.

She had two.

Leon stood in the dust outside the clinic with those two numbers side by side, and he did not shout, and he did not hit anything, and he said nothing to the sky, which was a dirty lid over a mining town and had never listened to anybody.

He understood, with perfect clarity, that the model was wrong.

Not the target. The target was the only fixed value in the system.

The method.

He had built eleven months on an assumption he had never examined, because it had not occurred to him that it was one: that the marks had to be earned. Remove that input and the sum resolved. Remove it and four thousand nine hundred and eighty stopped being forty-seven years and became a schedule with names in it. The broker at the port. The scrapline. The payroll strongbox that came up out of the Bellows on the eleventh of the month in an unarmoured crawler with two guards, forty-one and fifty-three, neither of whom had ever drawn anything at anyone in his life.

He turned the problem over once more, looking for the objection.

There wasn't one.

Something in him closed then, without ceremony, the way a hatch closes when the pressure equalises. A seal seating. A light going amber to green.

What he felt was the tidy satisfaction of a sum that finally balanced.

He stood another minute, filing it. Then he scraped the grit off his left boot against the edge of the step, because the hardened adhesive picked it up and worked it into the split, and went back inside to his sister.

She was awake and half sitting, in a clinic gown the colour of dishwater, hair escaping the hood in every direction, Pip on the blanket with its lights down.

"You were gone eleven minutes," she said.

"I was thinking."

"You were doing sums on the step."

"I was doing sums on the step," Leon agreed, and sat, and picked her feet up and put them back under the blanket where they were supposed to be, because she never kept them there. "I've been thinking about your outfit."

"Don't."

"Because it's a statement."

"It's a clinic gown, Leon."

"It's a clinic gown that ties at the back, El, which is a design philosophy, and I want you to know I respect it." He folded the blanket over her toes. "But we've discussed this. When you start wearing real clothes, we'll consider treating you like an adult."

"I own real clothes."

"You own one cardigan. I bought it. It's two sizes wrong."

"It's fashionably two sizes wrong."

"It's a tent."

"It's a silhouette."

"It's a tent with opinions," he said, and she laughed — small, cracked in the middle, real — and it took the drawn look off her face for about four seconds, and he had learned to be grateful for four seconds.

He kept the warmth going another twenty minutes. It was work. It had been work for eleven months and it got heavier every week, like the same tray up the same spine with a little less left in the arms, and he did not let it show. Not once. Not for a second.

Then she slept, and he sat in the chair in the dark and went back to the schedule.

The eleventh was nine days out.

The receiver lived in a fruit crate.

Leon had built it over eleven months out of things nobody would miss. The heart of it was a seismic telemetry set pulled off the slag pile at the Bellows — the kind that listens for rock stress and screams when a face is about to come down. Condemned for a cracked housing. Thrown out with the tailings. He had walked four kilometres in the dark to get it and four kilometres back with it inside his coat, and the housing had cut his forearm, and the cut had gone bad, and Sabine Orr had charged him one mark twenty for the debridement and told him he was an idiot in a way that suggested she saw eleven of him a week.

Wideband. Deaf below a hundred megahertz. Hungry above it. He gutted the stress filter and kept the ears.

The antenna was forty metres of stripped signal cable folded twice across Garren's roof and weighted at the corners with washers, so the wind would not sing it. The tuner was a mine radio with its face cut off. The clock came from a stolen relay board — corridor beacon, old landing field, taken in the sixth month with a spanner and no witnesses — and the board was the whole thing, really. The board carried Dominion frame timing and the sync words. Without those he had noise. With them he had a language.

Power: three hundred and ten watts off Garren's welding bus. Garren had never once mentioned the meter.

Heat: the board ran at sixty-one Celsius and derated at seventy. So there was a helmet lamp fan zip-tied above it, and a shallow dish of water on the sill, and in the hot hours of the long day Leon shut it down and slept instead, because a burned board cost eighty marks he did not have and would never have.

He could not break their ciphers. He had stopped trying in the third month. What he could read was everything wrapped around the ciphers — manifests, fuel drawdowns, berth assignments, medical requisitions, casualty replacement flows, the eleven-character routing prefixes that told you which command owned a message and how fast it was breathing. Traffic analysis. You do not need to hear what a man says if you can see who he says it to, and how often, and at what hour.

Eleven thousand four hundred and six intercepts. All of it on paper, in pencil, in a hand that had gotten smaller and tighter across the year. Nine ledgers under the bed. Paper cost 0.1 a sheet at the stall and he wrote on both sides.

They tell you everything, if you let them talk long enough.

What the Reach looked like from a fruit crate on Veridus-9, in the fourteenth month:

The Core Worlds were under military governance. Twenty-two systems. Prefect-officers seconded from the invasion fleet, civil courts suspended, tribunal panels sitting an average of nine minutes a case. He knew the average because they logged docket clearance rates, and the clearance rates were how the prefects competed with one another.

Halcyon still stood. That had surprised him. They had not burned it. They had catalogued it, which was worse, and smarter, and said more about Vantalar than any speech.

Lumengarde had been stripped. Every hall, the archive, the sub-levels, the wine. And in the ninth month they had opened the hangar under it and found it empty, and the traffic that came off that discovery was the loudest thing Leon had heard in a year. Four command prefixes arguing across three days. A verification team dispatched. Then a second verification team dispatched to verify the first.

Somebody had been relieved.

He had read that intercept eleven times. Then he went out into the yard and stood in the grit with his hands on his knees for a while.

You shipped it out before I could walk. You never said a word to anyone. It is not there.

The resistance was being eliminated. That was the flat shape of it, and he had watched it happen in the arithmetic. Cells existed — Corvane, Ilyat, the Serrin belt, forty or fifty groups he could infer from reprisal traffic alone — and they were scattered, uncoordinated, and coming apart one at a time under a method so patient it was almost clerical. The Dominion did not sweep. It waited, mapped, and then took a whole network in a single night with no shooting at all.

Ninety-one percent capture rate on second-generation cells. He had that figure twice, out of two unrelated logistics streams, and they agreed to the decimal.

And the fragments.

They had Unit-01's wreckage, recovered burning off Aurelion in the first weeks, moved somewhere under a research prefix, and they had put a great many people on it. Fourteen months on they could not crack the GN Drive geometry. They could not touch the Psycho-Frame neural interface at all. An assessment had circulated in the eleventh month, and the assessment leaked its own summary inside a resourcing request, which is how assessments always die.

The summary said: years.

Then, in the twelfth month, a new prefix appeared in the research stream. It had appeared thirty-one times since.

Countermeasures.

Leon set the pencil down and looked at the word in his own handwriting.

Not replication. Not exploitation. They had stopped trying to build one and started building the thing you build when you have accepted that the other man will eventually have one. That was a decision made by somebody with a long view and no vanity. It meant the clock he had been carrying in his chest for fourteen months was now being carried by two people.

He wrote the word at the front of the ledger and underlined it once. He did not underline it twice. He was not a man who underlined things twice.

Meridian-7 he had checked eleven ways, over four months, because being wrong about it would not cost him a wasted trip.

One: it sat forty-one light years inside the declared control envelope, in the Serrin quadrant, administered out of a fleet annex with a thin staff and an established reputation for late paperwork.

Two: it appeared in the picket rotation as a nineteen-day loop. Single corvette. Sensor sweep on arrival, sweep on departure, nothing in between. Not a garrison. A dog walking a fence.

Three: no atmosphere plant requisition. Ever. A garrison needs air.

Four: no water lift. A garrison needs water.

Five: no medical requisition — and this was the one he trusted, because in fourteen months of reading their mail he had learned that the Dominion would let a man run out of ammunition before it let him run out of analgesic. No medicine means no people.

Six through nine: fuel signatures, berth allocations at the annex, a survey drone rotation every forty days unchanged since the eighth month, and a hydrographic note calling the world category four, no exploitable resource, no strategic feature.

Ten: Meridian-7 had never once appeared in the research stream. Not adjacent to the fragments. Not adjacent to Lumengarde. Not adjacent to the empty hangar and the two verification teams and the officer who had been relieved.

Eleven was an absence. In the ninth month, hunting for where the thing had gone, they had queried three hundred and forty worlds. He had the query list. It was the most valuable object he owned, and it was four sheets of pencil, and he kept it inside the mattress.

Meridian-7 was not on it.

They did not know. A whole occupied galaxy turned over by professionals for fourteen months, and they did not know what was crated under a dead observatory on a survey world nobody had walked on in ninety years.

He sat with that in the dark, listening to the fan.

Then he went downstairs.

Garren was under the front axle of a hauler that had been dead six weeks. He did not come out.

"I need to get to Meridian-7."

The tapping stopped. Started again. Four hits, a pause, two.

"That's Dominion space."

"I know."

"That's Dominion space forty light years past the last honest border. Out through Serrin, through a transfer node they inherited whole with all the registry hardware still bolted to the deck." A grunt. The trolley came out. Garren sat up with a rag in his fist and looked at him with the flat, unhurried patience of a man two hundred and sixteen years old. "You'll die."

"Probably," Leon said.

He had rehearsed stopping there. Four days of rehearsal, walking to the Bellows and back, nine hours a shift, four marks a shift, four shifts a week since the rota was cut — and every rehearsal had ended with him stopping there.

He did not stop there.

"Orr says two years." His voice came out level, which was worse. "She said that in the eighth month, so it isn't two now. She said two if the tessamine holds. Tessamine is thirty-one a week. We make sixteen. I have been finding the other fifteen in ways I'd rather not itemise. Pip's cells are at forty percent and there is nothing on this planet that fits them." He stopped. Went on. "She was thirty kilos when we landed. She's twenty-seven."

Garren did not move.

"So — probably I die. She dies for certain. Those are the two numbers. I've had them both since the eighth month and I've run them every way there is and they don't improve."

The rag went round one set of knuckles, then the other. Outside, the wind threw a handful of grit at the shutter. Down the row, somebody was arguing about the price of lamp oil, which had gone from 0.6 to 0.9 in a fortnight because the corridors were shut and everything on this world now arrived by accident.

"How long have you known who we are?"

"Since the trainer."

Leon waited.

"Fourth month. Two in the morning, you went out to the back hangar and got into the AEGIS-B and ran her through a dry cycle. No reactor. Attitude sim on the auxiliary." Garren folded the rag into a square. "Sixty-year-old trainer with half her lattice stripped and sold, and you flew her in your head for two hours. I stood in the door for forty minutes of it."

"And."

"You do the thing with your left hand on the yaw plate that your father did. You don't hold it. You rest two fingers on it and let it come to you." He said it the way another man would identify an engine by its knock. "I served under Aria Zadkiel for eleven years. Directorate field engineering, second flotilla, long before he put on a Senate coat. Six of those years I was on his hull crew."

Leon found he had nothing at all to say.

"In my nineteenth year I had thirty years of lattice dust in me and a board that wouldn't classify it as service-incurred. Dust isn't a wound. Dust is a lifestyle." Garren's mouth moved slightly and did not become a smile. "Your father wrote one line on my file. Endorsed the exposure years as combat-adjacent. Cost him nothing. Took him eleven seconds. It's why my medicine has been paid for since before he ever met your mother, and it's why I'm two hundred and sixteen and not a hundred and forty."

He got up off the trolley slowly, both hands on the bench, and stood there breathing in the shallow way he had.

"Never paid it back. Can't. There's no size of thing that fits eleven seconds." He rolled his shoulder until it clicked. "I've got bad lungs and no children and there isn't one person on this rock who'll be worse off in the spring."

Then he went and got the charts.

Physical charts. Printed stock, folded in eighths, kept in a metal tube behind the compressor under forty years of dust, because anything on a terminal is a thing another man can read, and Garren Doss had spent three decades reading other men's terminals.

He spread them under the bench lamp, which had a bad connection and dimmed every time the compressor cycled. For six hours they worked the problem.

The picket: nineteen-day loop, Halric-pattern corvette, sweep in and sweep out, and a fourteen-hour sensor shadow trailing it while its own drive plume cooled. Eleven of those hours were usable. You went in behind it. Never in front of it.

The ship: the Dray. Ex-Concord surplus ore tender, forty-one years old, on blocks in the side yard since the corridors shut. Two thousand two hundred tonnes displacement, hold capacity nine hundred and forty. Garren tapped the frame diagram twice with a fingernail.

"Mass of the thing you're fetching."

"Crated, I'd estimate forty-four tonnes. Stripped frame is thirty-one."

"Then the hold isn't the problem. The hold is never the problem." He drew a line with the edge of his thumb. "Problem is the way in isn't the way out. Going in, you're empty and boring. Coming out you're either still boring, or you're the most interesting object in the quadrant."

"There's no version where I'm still boring."

"No," Garren said. "So something flies out."

"Yes."

Garren looked at him a moment, and then went on as though the word had not been said.

Fuel: the Dray carried three hundred and forty hours of reaction mass and the route wanted four hundred and ten. Seventy hours short. Seventy hours was a hundred and ninety marks at yard rate. It was thirty-four as agricultural slurry feed off the co-op at Talleret transfer — chemically filthy, nine percent hotter through the injectors, and it would cost them a flush and a set of seals on the far side. Seals were nine.

Garren emptied the tin onto the chart and they counted it in coin. Sixty-one marks and some brass.

They took the slurry.

Manifest: reclamation scrap, lattice-bearing, low grade, consigned to nobody. The only cargo left in the Reach that no bay officer wants to open, because cracking a lattice scrap container in a pressurised hold is how you get dust in your bulkhead seams for the life of the ship.

Codes: four blocks of Directorate transit stock, expired eleven years before the invasion. Useless as authority. Not useless as arithmetic — the Dominion had inherited the Concord registry infrastructure whole and had not rebuilt the low-tier code space, because rebuilding low-tier code space is expensive and dull and nobody is promoted for it. The checksum families still validated. An expired code did not open a door. It made a bored clerk's console show green and yellow instead of green and red, and yellow was a thing you cleared by glancing at a manifest that said lattice scrap.

Route: Veridus-9 to Talleret, six days. Talleret to the Corvane fringe, nine. Fringe to Serrin outer, eleven. Serrin outer to Meridian-7, four. Arrival day thirty-one, inside the picket's shadow with a margin of nine hours and forty minutes.

"That's thin," Garren said.

"That's what there is."

"That's thin," Garren agreed, and wrote it down.

The vault: Leon did not mention the door, or the word, or what language the word was in. Garren did not ask. He drew the observatory approach off a ninety-year-old survey plate, noted a service ramp on the south face, and said the ramp was a hundred and ten metres of unmaintained ferrocrete and would take a loader if the loader was patient and the driver was worse.

The lamp went low. The compressor cycled. Above them the floorboards made the small sound they made.

Leon had been listening to that sound for nine and a half minutes.

She took the stairs in four sections with a rest at each, because there were nineteen of them and they were steep and ten running steps greyed her vision. Nine and a half minutes was her honest time. Twelve on a bad day.

She stood in the doorway in the secondhand cardigan he had bought her in the third month, eleven marks off a stall at the end of the fourth row. Two sizes wrong. Sleeves past her knuckles. It had stopped being white in the fifth week and she wore it every day regardless. Her hair was under a scarf and had been under a scarf for seven months, since the morning her face went up two metres tall over the turnip row and stayed there.

Pip hung at her shoulder with its lights down to nothing, because she had told it that a bright thing in a dark room is a thing people remember.

"You're going to Meridian-7," Eliana said.

Neither of them answered.

"I've known since the fifth week." She came in and set a hand on the back of a chair. Not for effect. Standing cost her. "You read with your lips moving when you're tired. You've done it since you were nine. I have been reading over your shoulder for fourteen months and you never once turned a page over."

"Eli—"

"There's something on that world and Father put it there." Flat. An accountant reading a line item. "I worked that out in the sixth month. I've never asked what it is. I'm not going to ask tonight."

And there it was.

Their mother had lived twenty-six years above a hangar she never went down into. She had known. She had carried tea down at four in the morning and set it on the rail and asked about the weather and gone back up, and in twenty-six years she had not asked one question, because she had decided early that the not-asking was the load she could carry.

His sister stood in a doorway with her mother's whole spine in her.

Leon could not get his throat to work.

"You've got that face," Eliana said.

"You look like her."

"I know. It's very inconvenient. It ruins arguments."

Garren folded the charts, took the tube, and went out to the yard without a word.

"It's not a negotiation," Leon said.

"No. It's a term." She turned the signet on her thumb with one finger; the sunburst had worked round to the back again, the way it always did. "There's a difference, and you know there is, because you taught it to me when I was eleven and trying to get out of the accounts."

"Eli."

"You'll go. I'm not going to stand at the bottom of a staircase that takes me ten minutes and tell a man not to save my life. I'd have to be stupider than I am." She pulled her sleeve down over her hand. Old gesture. "So. My term."

"Say it."

"You wash your hands too long."

He did not move.

"Fourth month," she said. "You came up at some hour and you ran the tap for nine minutes and you never put the light on. And a man who used to stand near the water queue on Tuesdays stopped standing there. And Garren was in the yard at dawn with a shovel. Neither of you has said one word in ten months."

"Eliana—"

"I don't want to know." Her voice did not rise. It never rose. That was the frightening thing about her. "That isn't the term. I've thought about it for ten months and I decided I don't want to know, and I want you to understand that I decided it. Nobody protected me. I chose it, the way she chose it."

The lamp dimmed and came back.

"Here's the term." The violet had gone dark at the edges. Indigo creeping in. "You'll come back with something. I know what you are; you'll come back with something or you won't come back at all. And when you use it, you'll be someone. Everyone is someone by the time they put a thing like that down."

"Eli—"

"Two metres tall," she said. "Over the turnips. He offered them the corridors, Leon. The corridors and amnesty and their own courts back, and the price is one girl who's dying anyway. I stood four metres from three men doing the exchange rate out loud. One of them said it was cheap." She breathed. Steadied. "He wasn't cruel about it. He has three children. He was right about the arithmetic and he knew it, and so did I."

"You are not—"

"Don't." Sharp, once, and gone. "That isn't the term either."

She crossed the floor and stood in front of him, a hundred and forty centimetres of her, and put two fingers flat on his sternum, the way she had since she was six and he was eight.

"I'm not asking you to stay good. You won't, and I'd rather not make you a liar about something that size." The fingers pressed. "I'm asking you to tell me. Every time. The night you do the next thing you'd wash your hands for, you come up those stairs and you say it to me out loud, in words. Let me be the one person who has all of you." Her hand did not move. "Lie to me about what you're turning into and I'll spend the last two years I've got feeding a stranger with your face."

The compressor cycled. The lamp went low, came back.

"I'll tell you," Leon said.

He had the list ready. Vale's name. The cellar. Four minutes. Two hundred marks in a coat pocket he had not taken.

He would never say any of it.

He said the words anyway.

She searched his face for a long moment. Then she nodded, and let him have it, and he understood — with a cold, clean, arithmetical certainty — that she had let him have it on purpose.

"Good." She stepped back and pulled the ruined cardigan straight. "Bring me something warm. There's a hole in this elbow you could post a letter through."

"When you own a coat that fits," Leon said, "we'll begin considering whether to treat you like an adult."

It came out wrong. It came out with fourteen months on it.

She laughed anyway. One syllable. Then she got her arms round his ribs and held on for four seconds, and Pip drifted in above her shoulder and dimmed itself further, so as not to be a bright thing in a dark room.

Then she went and started up the stairs.

Eleven minutes. He stood at the bottom and listened to every part of it and did not offer to carry her, because she had asked him in the second month never to do that where anyone could see, and Garren was in the yard, and Garren counted.

The Dray came off its blocks at the third hour of the long night. They winched her out from under the sheeting and left her standing in the yard with the hold open and the ramp down. Forty-one years old. Streaked to the beam line in Veridus rust. Two thousand two hundred tonnes of ugly.

Leon stood in the dust and looked up.

There was nothing in that sky. There never had been. Veridus-9 sat on the outermost ring where the star fields thinned to almost nothing, and the grit haze took what was left, so what you got was an iron-coloured lid with three or four smeared points in it. In fourteen months he had never once caught himself watching it. That was the entire reason he could stand here now. On a roof in Halcyon, eleven days before the end, he had watched a point of light move fifteen seconds of arc in four minutes, and he had done the mathematics correctly, and reached the wrong conclusion, and gone inside.

Ninety-one point seven.

Unit-02 wanted about eighty-five for full authority. His father's figure had been sixty-one point four, and his father had locked the governor open and gone up and taken seventy percent of a fleet with him and died of it in under an hour. Leon had six points of headroom. Six. It was the whole of his inheritance. It was not a gift. It was a permission slip, and he had been carrying it in his mouth for fourteen months like a coin.

Above him, his sister's light went out.

Under the shop, in the cellar with the packed floor, there was a place where he had said one word out loud in the fourth month. Quietly. Before, not after.

He had not said it since.

He was not going to say it on Meridian-7 either.

He put the ramp up and went to load.