The Crossing

The ramp didn’t open.

He knew it wouldn’t. He went on hitting it anyway, until the deck stopped pressing up under him and the shudder went out of the hull and there was nothing left in his arms. Then he stopped, because he couldn’t feel his hands anymore, and sat back on his heels and looked at them.

His knuckles had split across the top. Blood was coming up along each one in a slow line. That was all there was in them. For the first time since Morwal’s door, he wasn’t holding anything. Ferra’s lamp lay somewhere on the floor of the berth in pieces. He was still in his good shirt, though it wasn’t good any longer. The blood on the collar had gone stiff and brown.

Behind him the cabin hummed. It was smaller than it had looked from the ramp: a deck of scuffed plate, benches folded flat against the walls, and a hatch forward where Tolliver sat in the pilot’s seat with his back to them. He hadn’t turned around since the ramp came up. Ansel looked at the back of his head, at the silver over his ears, and tried to hate him steadily, and found that the cabin wouldn’t hold still long enough for him to do it. The corner where the bench met the bulkhead was there when he looked at it, and then his eyes were somewhere else, on the deck, on the hatch, on his own hands, and he had to bring them back.

Maudry sat against the bulkhead with her legs out and Ferra across her lap. Her hand was where it had been since the lane. Her face was the color of ash.

“Kit,” she said. Not to him. “Tolliver.”

Tolliver reached under the console without looking and threw something back over his shoulder. It skidded across the deck and stopped against Ansel’s knee: a flat case with a red mark on the lid.

“Open it,” Maudry said. “The white rolls. And the bottle with the blue cap.”

He opened it. His hands shook and he let them. There were rolls of dressing packed in rows, and bottles, and things he didn’t know the names of. He found the white rolls and the blue cap and brought them to her on his knees.

“Pour it over your hands first. All over. Good.” Her voice was steady and very tired, a crew boss’s voice at the end of a long row. “Now. I’m going to move my fingers. Not my hand, my fingers. When I do, you pack that in under them. Hard. Harder than you think. She’ll make a noise. Don’t stop for it.”

“It’ll hurt her.”

“It’ll keep her,” Maudry said. “Go.”

She moved her fingers. He saw the wound for the first time, and then he didn’t look at it again. He looked at the dressing and at his own hands and did what she said. Ferra made the noise. He didn’t stop. When it was done Maudry pressed her palm down over all of it, and Ferra’s breath, which had gone ragged, came back slow under her hand, in and out, the way it had in the lane.

“There,” Maudry said, to Ferra or to him. “That’s the worst of it.”

He didn’t believe her. He sat back. His hands were red again, and most of it wasn’t his.

“Who are you?” he muttered.

No answer came from anyone, just as none had come all night.

He said it again, to Tolliver’s back this time. “Who are you? You’re not a cellar agent. You came every harvest and bought from Dareth every harvest. You called me his boy.” His voice was climbing and he let it. “Cellar agents don’t carry people up ramps like sacks. Cellar agents don’t wait behind the berths for people to come out of a wall.”

Tolliver flew the ship.

“How did you all know? You were there before us. All of you.” He turned to Maudry. “You knew where that passage came out. You knew before anything had even happened, you were already…”

Maudry looked at him over Ferra’s head. It was the look she had given Dareth in Ferra’s house, the one that went between them and left him out. She didn’t say anything.

“Why did he stay?”

Nothing.

“He said someone had to close the door behind me. What door? The shutters were closing on their own. They didn’t need anyone to…” He stopped. He was too tired to do the sum and too frightened not to. “What did he mean?”

Tolliver’s hands moved on the console. Maudry looked down at Ferra.

He knew this. He had grown up on it. Dareth’s way of not answering was to answer something else, or to go on tapping a cask as though the question had been put to someone in another room. These two didn’t even do that much. They let the question sit there, and he understood that they had agreed on it somewhere, long before tonight, the way they seemed to have agreed on everything else.

But he wouldn’t let it go, not this time. Not again. Not after everything that had happened.

“Carys is dead. Wendel is dead. The berthmaster is dead,” he said. “They shot him at the crank. I saw him sit down.” He didn’t know why he needed to say it out loud. Maybe so that someone on this ship would have to hear it and feel its weight the way he did. “Ruthe had the door. Dareth had the wheel. And the berthmaster…”

“Beron.”

Tolliver said it without turning around. He said it quietly, almost to himself. Then his hands went still on the console and stayed still, and Ansel watched his shoulders rise and fall once.

“His name was Beron,” Tolliver said. “He liked being the berthmaster. Said it had a ring to it.”

Ansel stared at the back of his head.

He had known the berthmaster all his life. Everyone on the Steps had. Nobody had ever said his name, not once, not in any harvest Ansel could remember. And Tolliver, who came for one season a year, said it as though he had always known it.

Beron. Ansel tried it in his head. It didn’t fit the narrow back and the squint, and then it did.

“Did they get out?” he said. “Dareth. Ruthe.”

Tolliver’s hands began to move again.

Ferra stirred. Maudry’s head came up, and something crossed her face, and she shifted her grip and was still. When she spoke, it wasn’t to Ansel.

“How far?”

“Four days.” Tolliver checked something. “Five, if I keep us dark the whole way.”

“I can’t hold her five days.”

Tolliver said nothing for a moment. “Then where?”

“Ilyra.”

He turned his head then, for the first time, though not all the way. “Ilyra writes everything down. Every ship into every port. And every clinic decides for itself who it takes. She has no papers. She has a knife wound, and she’s coming from a port where a man was…” His eyes went to Ansel and he stopped.

“They examine Menders there,” Maudry said. “Nowhere else does.”

“That isn’t where we…”

“I know where it isn’t.”

The ship hummed. Tolliver looked at her for an uncomfortable moment: at the ash in her face, at the hand that hadn’t moved.

“The old place,” he said. It wasn’t quite a question.

“If it’s still standing.”

“And if he comes looking where we were meant to be?”

“He knows it,” Maudry said. “He’ll know, and he’ll come.”

He. Ansel’s head came up. There was only one he who wasn’t on this ship. Ansel held on to that, and knew he was holding on, and didn’t let go.

Tolliver turned back to the console. The deck tilted under them, a long slow lean that Ansel felt in his stomach before he felt it anywhere else, and then it leveled.

Tolliver glanced at the screen by his left hand. Then he glanced at it again. He had been doing it since the ramp came up, Ansel realized: every so often, a look at the same place, at whatever lay behind them.

“Is anyone following?”

“No.”

Tolliver watched the screen a moment longer, as though it might change its mind. Ansel looked at the round of dark glass in the side of the hull. Somewhere behind it were the Steps, and the berth, and Dareth at the crank. He couldn’t see any of it from here. He didn’t need to. He had never needed to. He would only have to sit still and let it show itself, the way Morwal’s door had, the way everything did. It wouldn’t hurt. It wouldn’t be reaching.

He let his eyes go loose.

“Don’t.”

Maudry hadn’t raised her voice. She hadn’t moved her hand. She was looking straight at him over Ferra’s head, and he understood that she knew exactly what he had been about to do.

“It isn’t reaching,” he said. “I’d only be looking.”

“Every night you went after those faces,” Maudry said, “somebody was watching for it.” Her voice was very tired, and very even. “That’s how they found you.”

The ship hummed. Up front, Tolliver’s hands had stopped on the console. Ansel opened his mouth, and nothing came out of it. All those nights. Dareth turning his head on the pillow so he wouldn’t choke. Dareth begging him to stop, and Ansel promising, and lying, and going back to the faces the next night, and the next. Don’t reach tonight. Please. He had thought Dareth was afraid of what it did to him. And the one night he hadn’t reached, the one night he had only looked, something had looked back.

At the foot of the ramp he had asked, and Dareth had told him to get on the ship. This was the rest of it.

Carys on the floor with her fingers curled toward the latch. Wendel against the cradle. Beron at the wheel. Ferra, in Maudry’s lap, breathing because Maudry let her.

“Who?” he said. It came out of him in a whisper. “Who was watching?”

Maudry looked down at Ferra. “The rest is not mine to tell,” she said.

* * *

Maudry didn’t say anything more, and Tolliver kept his eyes on his console.

They traveled in silence for a long while, into what Ansel supposed was their first night aboard. Maudry kept her hand on Ferra’s wound while Ferra slept. She kept nodding off herself, and when she did, her hand would slip from the dressings and Ferra’s breathing would turn labored and painful. Then she would jolt awake and put her hand back on the wound, and Ferra’s breath would even out, and the color would drain from Maudry’s face, as though it cost her something Ansel couldn’t see.

“How long until Ilyra?” Ansel asked Tolliver.

“Two more days,” Tolliver replied, without taking his eyes off his controls.

“Two? But…”

“Wanting it won’t make the ship go faster.”

All this sitting around, when his whole life had come undone in a day and a night, was almost more than he could bear. He turned his attention back to Ferra.

Maudry’s eyes opened. She had been watching him, he realized, from wherever it was she went when she nodded off.

“Dressing wants changing,” she said. “You remember how.”

He did. He poured the blue-capped bottle over his hands, and his split knuckles took it like a slap. He hissed through his teeth and kept going. Maudry moved her fingers aside, and he peeled the old rolls away, dark and stiff, and packed the new ones in under her hand, hard, the way she had shown him. Ferra didn’t make the noise this time. That frightened him more than the noise had.

“Is she worse?”

“She’s tired.” Maudry pressed down. Her hand shook, very slightly, and then was still. “Talk to her.”

“She’s asleep.”

“Talk to her anyway. Keep her with us.”

He didn’t know what that meant. He didn’t see how talking could keep anyone anywhere. But he talked anyway. He told Ferra about the reserve rows and the frost that would be on them now, with nobody left to cut the last of the old vines. He told her the time with the lift still didn’t count, and that he would argue it in front of the magistrate if he had to. He told her she had said the witness words perfectly, every one of them, and hadn’t needed to practice them half as many times as she had.

Somewhere in the middle of it, her eyes opened. They didn’t find him right away. When they did, her mouth moved before any sound came out of it.

“That’s twelve.”

It was barely her voice. He didn’t understand. Then he did. Told him you’d be late. He had been late to her door, and she had been counting the whole time.

“That one doesn’t count.”

“Counts.” The corner of her mouth moved. “Counts twice.”

Something came out of him that was almost a laugh, and he had to look away from her until it passed. When he looked back, her eyes had gone past him, into the dark of the cabin.

“Is he dead?”

She didn’t say who. She didn’t have to.

“Yes.”

She was quiet for so long that he thought she had gone under again.

“I didn’t think,” she said. “He had his hands on me, and the knife was just there.”

He had no comfort to give her that he believed. He said the only true thing he had. “You didn’t have a choice.”

She looked at him then the way she always looked at him when he lied: patiently, waiting for him to give up. He waited with her. This time there was nothing to give up.

“You believe that,” she said, as though it surprised her.

“In the house,” he said, “you said you couldn’t hear anything in him. What did you mean?”

Her eyes slid away from his.

“Ferra.”

“I just do,” she said. It wasn’t an answer, and they both knew it.

He let it go. He knew what it was to have something you couldn’t explain. He had looked at a man across a cask in the court and found nothing there at all. He didn’t tell her that either.

“How did he know?” she said. “Which door was mine?”

He knew. He had walked her home. All the way down the Steps, arm in arm, with her lamp swinging between them, so that anyone who cared to could follow the light to her door.

“Later,” he said.

She looked at him, searching for an answer on his face. Then, as she had already done once that night on the road down, she let the later keep.

“What happened?” she said instead. “At Hushvault. He said there was trouble.”

“There was.”

He told her. He told it badly, out of order: the cups on the cask, the key, the braid lying across the stone. When he said Carys’s name, Ferra’s eyes closed, and he thought he had lost her. Then they opened again.

“She filled my cup to the top,” Ferra said. “After I was rude to her.”

“I know. I was there.”

“I was going to be rude to her again.” Her voice cracked on it. “Next harvest. I’d already thought of what to say.”

Up front, Tolliver’s hands had gone still on the console, the way they had for Beron. Ansel supposed the dead did that to people.

He looked down at Ferra, and without meaning to he felt his eye begin to open, the way it had at Auvren over the cutting. He could almost see it: the life in her, folded down small and held, like a breath someone was keeping for her. He tore his gaze away to the dressing and the plate of the deck and Maudry’s shaking hand. Not here. Not her. Looking wasn’t safe anymore, and it didn’t seem to care whether he wanted it to.

“Why would anyone,” Ferra began, and her eyes drifted shut before she could finish it.

Maudry’s hand pressed down. Ferra’s breathing slowed, and evened, and held. He could have finished it for her. That was the worst of it.

* * *

By what he assumed was the second day, Ansel had stopped trying to tell the hours apart. He had decided that the stretch after Ferra’s second dressing was afternoon for no other reason than that it felt like one. Maudry was asleep, truly this time with her head tipped back against the bulkhead and her mouth a little open. Somehow, her hand stayed where it was. It didn’t always. Ferra slept under it. Ansel had counted her breaths until the numbers stopped meaning anything, and then he had sat with his back to the bench and looked at the deck plate between his boots until he couldn’t stand that either.

He got up and went forward.

Tolliver didn’t turn around. The second seat stood empty beside his, and Ansel sat down before he could think better of it. For a day and a night he had looked at the back of this man’s head and not much else. Now that he sat beside him, he found he had nothing to say.

Tolliver didn’t send him away, and he didn’t say anything either.

Up close, he looked worse than Ansel had thought. The silver over his ears had gone dull, and there was a sheen on his forehead, though the cockpit was cold enough that Ansel had his hands tucked under his arms. Tolliver’s left hand lay on his knee, which he bounced up and down over and over. Every so often his hand closed, slowly, and opened again, as though it were working at something Ansel couldn’t see.

Nobody on this ship had slept properly, Ansel told himself. That was all it was.

He made himself look at the console instead. He had never sat in the front of a ship. He wanted to see the screens and the buttons and whatever it was that told Tolliver where they were going. He found the edge of the console, and then his eyes were on his own knee. He brought them back. He found a seam between two panels and followed it a finger’s width, and lost it. It was the cabin all over again, only worse up here, the way the ship had been at the berth. Everything stayed where it was. It just wouldn’t stay where he was looking.

Beside him, Tolliver’s eyes closed. It was no longer than a breath. And for that breath the cockpit came sharp and plain around Ansel, all at once, as though someone had wiped a pane of glass. The screens, each with its own steady light. A scratch across the console where something heavy had been dropped, long ago. A row of rivets along the bulkhead, every one of them exactly where it belonged. He saw it, really saw it, for the first time since the ramp came up.

Tolliver’s head jerked and his eyes opened. His hand closed hard on his knee, and the cockpit slid away from Ansel like water off a stone. Neither of them said anything. Tolliver wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist and went back to his screens. Ansel sat very still and didn’t try to look at anything.

After a while, Tolliver reached under the console. Ansel thought it would be the kit again. It was a bottle.

It had no label and no seal, only a cork pushed in by hand. Tolliver worked it out with his thumb, found two cups somewhere by his feet, the plain tin kind crews carry, and poured into each. Then he held one out without looking.

Ansel didn’t take it at first. The smell had already reached him. The last time he had breathed it, it had filled the whole court, and Ferra’s eyes had gone wide over the first glass.

“That’s Selvane’s,” he said.

“From the cask,” said Tolliver. “I said I would request an allocation. And I did.”

Ansel took the cup.

“Nobody should drink it alone,” Tolliver said.

They drank. It was as good as it had been in the court. That seemed wrong to Ansel, and he drank the rest of it anyway.

“How did you know his name?” he said.

Tolliver turned the cup in his fingers.

“Every harvest I came down on the same tender,” he said, “and every harvest Beron met it on the floor and told me it was late. It never was. I checked, the first few years. Then I stopped checking and started bringing him a bottle of something, and he told me that was late too.” He drank. “He thought the freight rates on Tiravel were a crime. He would tell you so at length. He never let a crate through that he hadn’t counted himself.”

It was the most Ansel had heard him say since the ramp. It didn’t explain anything. It wasn’t meant to, and Ansel found he didn’t mind. He sat with the cup in his hands and thought about the narrow back and the squint, and the berthmaster counting crates.

Tolliver’s head turned. A moment later Ansel heard it too: Ferra’s breath, catching. He twisted in the seat. Maudry was awake, or nearly. Her hand had slipped from the dressing, and she was feeling for it, and it took her a long moment to find the place. When she did, her fingers shook against the cloth. Ferra’s breathing caught once more and settled, and Maudry’s head went back against the bulkhead, and her eyes closed again.

Ansel turned back. Tolliver was still watching her. He watched her longer than Ansel had, and when he turned back to his screens, his face had gone very still.

“How long can she…” Ansel began.

“Long enough,” said Tolliver.

It didn’t sound like an answer. It sounded like something he was telling himself.

They sat. The ship hummed. After a while Ansel’s eyes drifted back toward the cabin, to the round of dark glass in the hull and whatever lay behind it. He hadn’t quite gotten there when Tolliver poured more into his cup without asking.

“He told me about your first mark,” Tolliver said, quietly, to the console. “Every harvest. As though I hadn’t heard it the year before. How he held the chalk out to you, and you pressed so hard it snapped, and you wouldn’t take another piece until you’d finished the mark with the stub.”

Ansel didn’t remember that. He believed it anyway.

“Every harvest,” Tolliver said again, and drank.

Ansel looked down at his cup. He had always liked this man well enough: the purple coat, the allocations, the jokes Dareth pretended not to hear. Since the ramp he had tried to hate him, for the arms that wouldn’t let him go back. That had been simpler. Now Tolliver sat gray and sweating at his console, holding the ship together with whatever it was he held it together with, and the old liking was coming back, and Ansel hated that it was.

He drank the second cup more slowly than the first. At some point his head came to rest against the side of the seat, and the cockpit went soft at the edges, and he let it. The last thing he saw was the two tin cups side by side on the console.

* * *

It came out of the wine, or from under it. He could see a long straight seam in gray metal, and light was crawling along it. Blue light, thin as a thread, moving the way frost moves across a pane, never seeming to go anywhere and yet always farther along than it had been.

Then weight. It pressed down on him from everywhere at once, so heavy he couldn’t lift his chin. Somewhere in it a woman was counting. She stood at the foot of a ramp with her hands out in front of her, palms down, as though she were holding something flat against the air, and she would not stop.

“…nine. Ten. Eleven.”

She began again. “One.”

A bag, the kind a crew carries on one shoulder, and inside it, among the rolled shirts, a tin. Only a tin. He didn’t know why it frightened him. It sat there among the shirts, and he couldn’t make his eyes leave it.

Fists on a door. Many fists, and the door didn’t move. He couldn’t hear the hammering. He could only see the hands, and the door not opening.

A man sat on the floor with his back against a wall. He wasn’t hurt that Ansel could see. His hands lay open on his knees, and he was looking at something across the room with a face Ansel had seen once before, on Dareth, the night he set his cup down on the frost wall. As though he were settling something.

He didn’t get up.

Ansel turned toward them, the woman and the hands and the man, and found nothing he knew. No face he had ever seen. No place he had ever been. He couldn’t have said whether it was happening, or had happened, or was still to come. The weight came down harder, and the blue light reached the end of its seam, and everything went white.

He woke with his cheek against the side of the seat. For a moment he didn’t know where he was. Then the cockpit slid away from his eyes, and he knew. His head had split along the old crack, the way it had on the cot above the cellar, and when he lifted it, something warm ran over his lip. He put his hand up. His fingers came away red. There was more red down the front of his shirt than there had been, and this time all of it was his.

Behind him, Maudry’s hand was on Ferra. It didn’t move. It couldn’t. Something touched his arm. A cloth, folded square. Tolliver held it out without looking at him, the way he had held out the cup. Ansel took it. He pressed it under his nose and tipped his head back, and the ceiling slid around above him, and he shut his eyes against it.

He didn’t say what he had seen. He had never said, not to anyone but Dareth, and even then not always. He wouldn’t have known where to start. It would sound like fever, and maybe it was.

Tolliver didn’t ask. He waited until Ansel brought the cloth down and looked at it, and then he said, gently, in the voice he used for buyers who had tasted something that disappointed them, “You couldn’t have done anything.”

Ansel looked at him.

“None of us could have,” said Tolliver. “Not for the Morwal girl.”

He meant it kindly. Ansel could hear that he meant it kindly. He had seen a boy come shaking and bleeding out of a bad sleep, thought he knew what the boy had dreamed, and reached for the only comfort there was.

The Morwal girl.

Ansel had heard him say it before. In the court, with Morwal’s wine still warm in his mouth, turning away from Carys’s cask with his ears burning. Tolliver’s voice behind him, easy and pleased, the voice of a man with a bottle in his hand and nowhere to be.

The Morwal girl has the better eye, if you ask me. Came to Wendel as a ward, you know, all the way from…

He hadn’t heard the rest. He hadn’t wanted to. Tolliver had been standing with the strangers. Not near them. With them, filling their glasses, Selvane’s wine going into the cups of the men in new coats while he told them who had the better eye and where she had come from. And a moment later one of those men had turned to Carys and asked about her first mark, and her whole face had changed.

The bottle stood on the console between them, the cork beside it.

“You pointed them at her,” Ansel said.

Tolliver didn’t answer right away. His hand had gone still on his knee.

“It bought you the night,” he said.

It wasn’t yes. It wasn’t no. It was worse than either, because it meant there had been a night to buy, and a price for it, and Tolliver had looked at the two of them, the Selvane boy and the Morwal girl, and decided who would pay.

Ansel came out of the seat at him. He didn’t think about it. There was nothing left in him to think with. The cloth went one way and his elbow went into the console, and the tin cups went off it ringing and rolled away across the deck. He got one fist into Tolliver’s shoulder before Tolliver had his wrists, both of them, in hands that were no cellar agent’s hands, the way they had held him on the ramp. Ansel pulled and twisted and kicked at his shins, and none of it did anything at all.

And for a breath, as they strained against each other, the cockpit came plain. Every rivet. Every screen. The scratch on the console. Tolliver’s face, very close, gray and wet and furious, and something under the fury that Ansel didn’t have time to name.

“Not here.”

Maudry hadn’t shouted. She never had to. Ansel’s head turned before he meant it to, and he hated that too.

“Where, then?” His voice cracked, and he let it. “The old place? You’ll tell me there, will you? The way you were going to tell me later. The way he was going to tell me later. The way everybody on the Steps was always going to tell me later.” He wrenched at his wrists, and Tolliver let them go, and the cockpit slid away. Ansel stood over him with his hands empty and shaking. “He gave them Carys. Did you hear him? He looked at her, and he looked at me, and he chose. And Wendel got it too because of him.”

Tolliver didn’t answer.

Ansel rounded on him. “Say it. You could say Beron’s name. Say hers.”

The ship hummed. Tolliver sat with his hands on his knees and looked up at Ansel, and for once he didn’t look away.

“Yes,” he said. “I gave them Carys. They were choosing between two, and I made it one.” His voice didn’t change at all.

There was nothing in the world to say to that. Ansel turned to Maudry instead, because she was there, because she was the only other person on the ship who could hear him.

“Did you know?”

“No.”

“Did he?”

She knew who he meant. “No.”

“Then what else don’t you know?” He was shouting now. He could hear it come back at him off the bulkheads. “What else did somebody decide about me while I was asleep above the cellar? Twenty-one years. Every one of you. You came every harvest and bought the wine, and sang the songs, and danced once with great dignity, and all that time you were…” He couldn’t find the end of it. “I’m not a cask. You can’t keep me in the dark.”

Ferra’s breath caught.

It caught and didn’t let go. Maudry’s hand had come off the dressing and was going back to it, and missing, and going back again, and Ansel was on his knees beside them without remembering crossing the deck. Her fingers found the place. They were shaking so hard he could see it, and it took longer than it ever had before Ferra’s breath came loose and went on: in, and the catch, and out.

Maudry didn’t look up from her.

“You want something that isn’t later,” she said. “Here it is. The kit isn’t keeping her alive. I am. I have been since the lane. Every time I sleep, I lose a little of her. I can’t lose any more of her to this.”

She didn’t say what this was. She didn’t have to. Up front, Tolliver’s hands had gone still.

Maudry lifted her hand a finger’s width off the dressing, so Ansel could see how it shook, and put it back.

“We’re a day out,” Tolliver said quietly.

“I don’t know how long I have left in me,” Maudry said. “A day. Maybe a little more.”

Ansel stared at her hand. He had seen it the first night, he realized. He had even thought it, and not let himself.

“The rest,” Maudry said, “you’ll have at the old place. All of it.”

“Swear it.”

She looked at him then. Her face was the color of ash, and her eyes were very steady.

“On every row I ever ran,” she said.

It wasn’t everything. It wasn’t close to everything. But it was the first thing anyone had given him that wasn’t later, and he took it, because he could see what giving it had cost her. Then Maudry lifted her head and looked past him, forward, at Tolliver in the pilot’s seat. Ansel had seen her look at a picker who cut green fruit on purpose. This wasn’t that look. He had never seen this one.

“Fly the ship,” she said.

Tolliver turned back to his console.

Ansel sat on the deck beside Ferra with his back against the bench. Somewhere along the way he had picked the cloth up again. He didn’t remember doing it. It was stiff with his blood, still folded square, and it was Tolliver’s, and he found he couldn’t give it back and couldn’t throw it away. He held it in his lap.

The cups lay where they had rolled, one against the kit and one under the bench. Nobody picked them up.

A woman counting, he thought. Eleven. A tin in a bag. A man who didn’t get up. He didn’t know who they were. He wouldn’t tell anyone on this ship that he had seen them. There was nobody left on it he would tell.

* * *

Ilyra came up in the viewport a little after what Ansel had decided to call morning. At first it was only a light, brighter than the stars around it. Then it was a disk, and then it was a world, and he forgot to be angry long enough to look at it. Shallow seas so pale they were nearly green. Uplands laid out in long soft stripes of cultivation, the way the Steps were laid out in terraces, only gentler, and enormous. Here and there along the shores, cities, cream and white, so small from up here that he could have covered one with his thumb.

He had never seen a world from outside. He had lived his whole life on one and never once seen its edge.

Nobody had said much since the fight. Tolliver had flown and Maudry had held. Ansel had sat by Ferra quietly running the events of the past three days through his mind as if he could change any of it. Something chimed at the console. Tolliver touched it, listened, and said a few words Ansel couldn’t catch. Then he sat for a moment with his hands flat on his knees.

“They’re sending a pilot,” he said. “Nobody flies their sky but them.” He didn’t turn around. “They’ll want to see us first.”

He took a breath, a long one, the way Ansel had seen pickers breathe before they lifted the last full basket of a day. Then he let it go, and something else went with it.

The ship came plain.

Not for a breath this time. All at once and all over, and it stayed. Ansel saw the whole cabin at last, holding still: a small, tired ship, older than he had thought. The scuffed plate of the deck. The benches folded against the walls, one with a strap torn loose. The kit lying open, half its rolls gone. A dark stain on the deck where Maudry had sat the first night, that nobody had cleaned and nobody would. The two tin cups. Maudry against the bulkhead, and Ferra in her lap, and Maudry’s hand.

He saw Tolliver last. He was gray to the lips. His knee had stopped bouncing. His hand lay open on it and didn’t close. Slowly, like a man getting up after a long illness, he pushed himself out of the pilot’s seat for the first time in three days and stood holding on to the back of it.

Ansel didn’t want to notice. He noticed anyway. The pilot came aboard through a hatch Ansel hadn’t known was there. She was a small, neat woman in a green coat, and she looked at all of it, the stain and the cups and the kit and the girl, without any expression at all. Then she sat down in the seat Tolliver had left and put her hands on the controls as though they were hers. Under the law, Ansel supposed, they were.

“Vessel,” she said.

Tolliver told her. She wrote it down.

“Master.”

He told her that too.

“Passengers. Names and papers.”

Tolliver gave her three names, his own and Maudry’s and Ansel’s, and held out papers for all three. Ansel didn’t know where his had come from. He didn’t ask.

The pilot looked at Ferra.

“She has none,” said Maudry. It was the first thing she had said since Fly the ship. Her voice was nearly gone.

The pilot wrote something down. Then she touched her collar and spoke into it, briskly, in words Ansel didn’t know, and somewhere a long way off someone answered her. She turned back to the controls.

“Saphren,” she said. “You have priority. Hold on to something.”

The descent was long and loud, a lean that went on and on. The deck shook under them, and the round of glass went white, and then orange, and then blue. Ansel held on to the bench with one hand and Ferra’s ankle with the other. Maudry’s hand shook all the way down. He watched it the whole time. She was past gray now. There wasn’t a word for the color she was.

When they landed, everything weighed twice what it should. He found that out when he tried to stand. His own body came up off the deck far slower than he was used to, and his knees nearly went. He had known other worlds were heavier, but nobody had told him what it would feel like to be one of the things that weighed more.

Maudry stood up with Ferra in her arms.

He didn’t know how. He saw her knees give and catch, and give and catch, and her jaw set, and then she was on her feet with Ferra held against her the way she had held her in the lane, one arm under her shoulders, the other hand flat on the wound. She went down the ramp at a walk. She didn’t let anyone take her.

Saphren was water and glass. That was all Ansel would remember of it afterward, the way you remember a place you were carried through in a fever: a clear lake so still it held the hills upside down, and pale buildings standing back from it among lush gardens. Paths that crossed the water on long thin bridges that looked as though they couldn’t possibly bear anyone’s weight. There were plants everywhere, in beds and in pots and climbing the walls, and people moving among them slowly, as though nobody here had ever had to hurry.

The hall they were brought into was the quietest room he had ever been in. Light came down through a glass roof onto a floor of pale stone and a long, low pool with something green growing in it. People sat on benches along the walls and waited and didn’t talk. Across the end of the hall ran a desk, and behind it sat a young man with a slate in front of him.

“She needs a Mender,” Maudry said.

The young man looked at Ferra. He looked at the dressing, and the blood, and the marks on her throat. Something moved in his face and was put away.

“Her name?”

Maudry told him.

“Her papers?”

“She has none.”

“Her port of departure?”

Tolliver answered that one. He had come up beside Maudry, and his voice was the buyer’s voice again, warm and easy and a little rueful, as though they were all sensible people caught in a regrettable inconvenience. The young man listened. Then he looked down at his slate, where something was already written, and Ansel understood that the pilot’s words had come down ahead of them.

“There were deaths at that port,” the young man said. “It’s on the boards.”

“The girl was attacked,” said Tolliver. “She defended herself. I can stand for her. I can stand for all of us, and I’ll cover every…”

“Sir.” The young man said it very politely. “This hospital decides its own admissions. Your standing doesn’t enter into it. Nor does your purse.” He laid his hand flat on the slate. “She comes from a port with deaths on the boards, with a knife wound and no papers to say who she is. Taking her in is a decision, and every decision this hospital makes is printed, with a name beside it and the reasons under the name. I can’t put mine to it.” He waved them off, not unkindly. “She hasn’t been cleared.”

Tolliver opened his mouth. For once, nothing came out of it. Ansel was glad to hear that voice fail, and then he looked at Ferra, gray in Maudry’s arms with her eyes closed, and the gladness turned over in him and became something he was ashamed of.

“Then clear her,” Ansel said. It came out too loud for the room. People on the benches looked up. “She’s dying. Look at her. Somebody look at her.”

Somebody did. A door had opened at the side of the hall, and a woman came through it. She was neither young nor old, in a plain cream robe, and she wasn’t hurrying either. She came across the stone and stopped in front of Maudry and looked at Ferra for a few moments. Then she looked at Maudry’s hand and then at Maudry’s face.

Something passed over her own face that wasn’t surprise. Ansel thought it was recognition.

“How long?” she said.

“Three days,” said Maudry.

The woman’s eyebrows went up a fraction. She didn’t ask anything else, but turned to the desk.

“I’ll take her.”

“She hasn’t been cleared,” the young man said.

“Then I’m clearing her.” She said it mildly. “Write it down. My name, and my reasons, and the hour.”

The young man went to his slate and wrote.

Maudry leaned toward the woman and said something very low, close to her ear. Ansel was standing right beside them, and he didn’t hear a word of it. It might have been a name. The woman went still, the way the berthmaster had gone still at the edge of the lamplight, and then she nodded once.

She laid her hand on the dressing beside Maudry’s.

For a moment there were two hands there, side by side, one shaking and one steady. Then Maudry took hers away.

Her hand had slipped a dozen times since the lane, and every time it had gone back. This time she let it go. Ansel saw her look down at her empty palm as though she didn’t know whose it was. Then her knees went.

He got to her before she hit the floor. He got under her arm and took her weight, and her weight here was twice what it should have been, and so was his, and they went down together onto the stone floor, slowly, but he held on.

“Got her,” Maudry said into his shoulder. He couldn’t tell which of them she meant.

Others came, quickly and quietly. They took Ferra through one door on a stretcher, and the Mender went with her and didn’t look back. Others lifted Maudry off him, gently, and took her through another. He tried to follow, and someone put a hand on his chest, not hard, and said, “Not you. Not yet.” The doors closed.

He sat on the stone where they had left him. After a while he got up, suddenly becoming conscious that the people on the benches were staring at him, and he sat down on the end of a bench himself. Tolliver came and stood a pace away and didn’t sit. Neither of them said anything.

The boards were on the far wall, above the pool. He hadn’t noticed them before: long panels of pale glass with writing moving across them, line after line, slowly, the way Ilyra did everything. The hospital’s decisions, each with its reasons. Arrivals and departures at the orbital port. News from the other moons. He watched it the way he had watched the deck plate between his boots. He wasn’t really reading it.

Then he was.

From Kharad. A surge in the Deep has cost several pump stations. Station Seven is among those lost, with its crew of eleven. The cause has not been established.

He read it again.

Eleven.

A woman at the foot of a ramp, her hands out flat against the air, counting. Nine, ten, eleven. Beginning again. A tin in a bag among rolled shirts. Fists on a door that didn’t open. A man sitting against a wall, settling something, who didn’t get up.

He had never heard of Station Seven. He had never seen any of their faces before, and now he never would, because they were gone, all eleven of them, and the board didn’t even know how. He had been asleep in a chair with a tin cup on the console while it happened, or after it had already happened, and he would never know which.

Beside him, Tolliver was reading the same line. Ansel saw his eyes stop on it, and something go through his face and be put away. Tolliver didn’t know what it meant to Ansel. Ansel didn’t tell him.

Whatever you saw, it came late.

Dareth had said that in Morwal’s gallery, kneeling over Carys. Ansel had asked him what good it was, and Dareth hadn’t answered.

He still didn’t have an answer. He sat on the bench in the heavy, quiet hall with Tolliver’s cloth folded in his fist, and watched the line go by until it was gone.