Terms of Service

Tavi spread the remains of the regulator on a clean sheet of paper.

The pieces made a smaller arrangement than Vera expected. A bent gear, two sections of the measuring tube, a half-circle of cloudy glass. The contact collar sat separately, its edge discolored where Iona had closed the damaged path before removing it.

Tavi had drawn around each piece before moving it. Fine pencil outlines remained on the paper where the smallest fragments had already been sorted into a tray. Beside the outlines, columns of local script ran between arrows and dimensions. Vera understood the reason for the marks more easily than the words.

Her own hands lay palm down on her thighs. Someone had lent her a clean work coat while her coveralls dried. It was too large at the waist and pulled across her elbows when she bent them. The sleeve over her left arm remained rolled up, exposing the skin that everyone wanted to look at and few wanted to touch.

"Was it worn out?" Vera asked.

Tavi did not answer immediately. They turned the bent gear under a lamp and looked at the underside.

"No."

Vera glanced toward the split rifle on the next bench.

"Both broke."

"Both were asked to do something they were never made to do. That's different."

Their voice was level, but they put the gear down more carefully than necessary.

"Oran brought this in every service day. Even when he thought I was charging him too much. The cartridge was old. The work wasn't bad."

"I wasn't saying your work was bad."

"You were looking for a simple reason. So am I."

Tavi shifted the lamp until light entered the fractured tube from the side. A series of very small marks appeared along its base.

"These are service stamps. Three different hands before mine. Somebody replaced this seat instead of trying to make the first one last forever. Somebody paid for the replacement."

They set the tube down beside its outline and took a moment to align it with the pencil mark.

Vera recognized what she had done. Two failed machines suggested a bad batch or neglected maintenance, a fault that could be moved away from the person connected to them. She had reached for the explanation before she had looked at the evidence. Tavi's irritation was easier to accept when she stopped treating it as an obstacle to her question.

They were in the open-sided workshop. Iona had insisted on the location: room to move, no occupied ward behind the benches, no unnecessary connections. A line had been chalked on the floor around Vera's stool. She had drawn it herself when somebody asked how much space she needed.

The answer was that she did not know.

The chalk circle crossed an older stain and stopped at the edge of the bench. Beyond it, the workshop remained in use. A woman filed a replacement pin at the far end; another worker wound clean tubing onto a spool. They spoke less than they had before the alarm. Every time the file stopped, Vera could hear the small sounds from the ward across the yard.

Through the open side she could see the crane crew replacing the warning rope. One person held a post upright while another struck it with a wooden maul. The rhythm came in groups of three, with long pauses to check the alignment. Work had resumed around the place where people had been lying in the dirt.

Tavi put a hand lens beside the fractured measuring tube. "This part opened to whatever your collar saw. It failed outward, which is what it's supposed to do when the measuring side is overloaded. The main body stayed on you."

"So it worked."

"Part of it did. Nobody stands around celebrating the part when the other part has just thrown glass through the room."

Tavi took a thin wooden pointer and indicated the collar's broad lower section, then the smaller neck where the measuring head had attached. There was no attempt to hide the difference in scale. Vera could imagine the narrow part giving first without pretending that explained what it had encountered.

"Could you build one that didn't break?" she asked.

Tavi looked at her, then toward the bank beyond the workshop.

"For you? I don't know what size of question you've asked."

They put the pointer down. "I can build something cheaper to lose while we find out. That will take a little thought."

The lamp showed a thin bright line along the tube's interior. Tavi asked Vera not to touch it. She kept both hands on her knees.

They examined the rifle next. Vera had expected an accusation about destroying it. Tavi instead asked exactly when its sound changed. She described opening the coupling, the rising note, the sensation under her ribs.

"Before the trigger?"

"Yes."

Tavi made a mark on the paper.

"And you felt better?"

"I felt something cool. I don't know if better is the right word."

"Good. Keep not knowing that until we measure it."

They reached for a fresh sheet, then stopped and used the unused corner of the first one. Vera watched the pencil travel. Tavi's handwriting grew smaller as the space ran out, but the spaces around the sketches stayed generous.

"Do you want me to draw where I felt it?" Vera asked.

Tavi slid the paper to the edge of her circle. She drew the outline of an arm and a line inward from the wrist, stopping below the ribs. Then she added a question mark beside the end.

Tavi studied the sketch. "Leave the question mark."

The camp commander arrived carrying his own chair.

He was a broad man with gray at his temples and a regulator smaller than Venn's. It made almost no sound. He put the chair outside Vera's chalk line, sat, and introduced himself as Captain Dorr.

One of the chair's feet landed on a shallow groove in the boards. Dorr stood, shifted it, and sat again without asking anyone to do it for him. There was fresh dirt on the cuffs of his trousers and a damp patch beneath one arm. His coat was better fitted than the ones worn on patrol, but its lower button had been replaced with one that was too dark.

He noticed her looking at his regulator.

"Yes," he said. "It works faster."

"How much faster?"

"Enough to keep me useful longer. Not enough to keep everybody else on their feet."

He pulled the sleeve back down. Vera could still hear the other workers' devices above its softer sound. She wondered what it cost, and who decided whose wrist it belonged on.

"I understand you saved four people this afternoon."

"I fired where the sergeant told me."

"You also survived an unregulated connection that destroyed two service instruments."

Tavi looked up. "One was a weapon."

"Two items of service equipment," Dorr amended.

Vera found that small correction more useful than the introduction.

Dorr's gaze went to the drawing by Vera's hand. She left the paper where it was. He studied it briefly without reaching for it, then looked toward the covered route to the ward. A stretcher wheel rattled over a joint in the paving. He waited for the sound to pass before continuing.

Dorr laid a form across his knee. "There are procedures for unregistered capacity."

"Capacity for what?"

"Exposed service. Industrial work. Hazard control."

"You don't know what I can do."

"I know some of it."

"You know what didn't kill me."

He looked at her for a moment, then turned the form over so its blank side faced up.

"Tell me where you came from."

She told him. Not everything she had thought while standing on the beach, and not a polished theory about another world. A research operation. A small sub. A light. A hull noise that should have been the last thing she heard. A shore she did not recognize.

At first she used the words she would have put in an incident report. Position. Equipment. Last reliable observation. Then Dorr asked how many people had been inside the vessel. She had to separate the voice she remembered from the space she remembered it filling. Amin's voice had come from the surface. She told him she had been alone inside.

The workshop's oil smell brought back the little enclosed cabin more strongly than the questions did. Her knees close to a panel. A cloth caught beside the base of a bracket because she had not wanted it floating loose while she worked. The inspection light showing a screw she would need to reach later. Mundane details, all arranged around a future she had been expecting to have.

She drew the outline of the vessel on the paper, with herself inside and a line toward a rough shape for the support ship above. The diagram was crude. Dorr bent forward to follow it. When he pointed to the upper shape, she gave Amin's name and explained that he had been speaking to her from there.

"Would he look for you?" Dorr asked.

"Yes."

That answer needed no qualification. She let it stand.

He asked who employed her and whether the name was a district or a company. He asked what a sub was. Tavi stopped sorting parts when she explained the pressure outside its enclosure.

"You weren't exposed to that," they said.

"No. The enclosure kept it out."

"Until it failed."

"I remember it starting to fail."

Tavi looked at the broken collar, then back at her. They did not make the leap aloud.

The person filing the pin had stopped. Tavi looked toward the far bench, and the filing resumed. Vera was grateful for the noise. She had not intended the account for an audience, but there was nowhere private that Iona had agreed to use.

Dorr said, "There may be people in Bellwether who can interpret your account."

"Can I go there?"

"Under escort."

"Am I arrested?"

He took a little longer to answer than she liked.

"No charge has been entered."

"That isn't what I asked."

Outside the workshop, a cart passed carrying the cleaned stretcher. Someone had folded the cloth into a neat square at its foot. Vera watched until it was out of sight.

A man pushing the cart glanced toward the workshop. Dorr met his eyes and gave a small nod. The man continued uphill. Neither of them needed to ask which stretcher it was.

Vera returned her attention to the form. It had boxes large enough for a few words and a printed line at the bottom. Whatever the boxes were for, her morning had not fitted inside them when Dorr walked in. Turning the page over had made room, but had not removed the authority of the paper.

Dorr put the form on the bench.

"I can order quarantine pending evaluation," he said. "I cannot order a useful evaluation until Vale and Rusk know how to perform one safely. I have eighteen people available for exposed duty on paper and fewer than that now. I would prefer you to stay and help us understand what happened."

"Those are two requests."

"Yes."

Dorr rested his forearms on his knees. He had stopped holding the form where it could be written on.

"The road out runs through places my people survey," he said. "I can give you a route. I can't promise it will remain usable tomorrow. If I send an escort, those are people I cannot put elsewhere. If you stay, I need to know where you are when an alarm sounds."

It was the first time he had described what her freedom would cost in terms she could inspect. She could dislike the limits and still hear the people inside them.

"Then say that," Vera said. "Don't make it sound as if I'm already part of your roster."

He nodded once, not warmly.

She considered leaving. She had no map she could read, no place to go, no explanation for her body. Staying was not a free choice in the comfortable sense. It was still a choice she wanted named accurately.

"Food. Dry clothes. A place to sleep with nobody else next to me until we know more. No connections without asking me. No test on a patient."

Iona, who had been listening from the doorway, said, "That last condition is mine as well."

The medic had brought a plate with a piece of bread and pale fruit cut into quarters. She set it at the edge of the bench, within Vera's reach, and went back to her place by the door. Vera had been hungry until somebody put food in front of her. Now she could see sand still caught beneath one thumbnail.

She wiped her hands on the cloth beside the plate. The fruit was sharp enough to make her mouth water. She ate a quarter while Dorr considered the conditions, and found it easier to follow him afterward.

Vera continued. "You record that I borrowed Oran's equipment because Sergeant Venn asked me to help. You don't charge his family for what happened to it."

Dorr looked at the collar. "The cartridge had a private improvement bond. I'll need the quartermaster's record."

"Then get it."

"I can suspend collection immediately. Settling it requires authorization."

She did not like the distinction, but it was more credible than an easy promise.

"Put both of those things down."

Tavi slid over a pencil.

Dorr drew a line on the paper before he wrote. Tavi watched the tip of the pencil. When he reached the equipment clause, they supplied the cartridge's identifying marks from memory. He asked them to check those against the housing anyway. Tavi picked up the collar and did so.

Vera waited until the last mark had been copied. The brass tag was with Iona. The broken machinery would stay here. Each had belonged to the same man an hour earlier, and now different people would decide what happened to them.

They wrote a short agreement on the blank side of the form. Dorr would provide shelter and essentials for three days. Vera would remain within the camp's surveyed boundary and cooperate with noninvasive observation. Further work required a named task and consent. She was not enlisted. Iona could stop a medical test. Tavi could stop a technical one. Dorr could stop camp operations if they threatened others, but could not order either specialist to declare a result safe.

Vera could not read the finished cursive. She asked each of them to read the conditions aloud, separately enough to notice differences. Dorr looked mildly offended. Iona did not.

The spoken sentences arrived clearly in Vera's mind while the pencil marks remained unfamiliar. She followed each line with a finger beside the page. A symbol that appeared three times seemed to stand for the camp; another occurred at the start of every condition. She remembered their shapes without assuming she knew how to use them.

Venn arrived to witness the signatures. She was moving one shoulder more stiffly than before.

"You should be in the ward," Iona said.

"I'm going."

"After this?"

"After this."

When it was her turn to sign, Vera wrote the name she had written inside her boot. It looked conspicuous among the other hands. She moved the paper away before she could feel embarrassed by it.

Vera watched the sergeant sign. The pen rested in a hand that had shaken only after the emergency ended.

Venn read the equipment clause again. Then she drew a short line beneath her signature and added something beside it.

"What did you write?" Vera asked.

"That the request to use it was mine."

She capped the pen with care. Iona held the workshop door open for her, and this time the sergeant went through without finding another task on the way.

When Dorr left, Tavi brought Vera a tin basin and a plain wooden spoon. They put the basin inside her chalk circle and asked whether she would mind touching the spoon, then the water, while they watched from a little way away.

"No instruments?" Vera asked.

"A ruler and my eyes. We'll survive the lack of elegance."

She picked up the spoon. Nothing broke. She pressed its bowl against her palm, first gently, then harder. It left an ordinary indentation. When she dipped her hand into the water, ripples reached the edge of the basin and came back.

Tavi wrote that down too.

Vera held the spoon up in the light. Water slipped from its worn bowl onto her knee. Along the handle, repeated washing had raised the grain enough to roughen it against her fingers. She pressed harder, then stopped when the wood began to flex. She had no wish to turn an ordinary broken spoon into another misleading result.

Tavi had watched the water rather than her face. Now they checked both and drew a small circle beside the new note.

"Disappointing?" she asked.

"Extremely reassuring."

Later they gave her a storage room behind the laundry, emptied of solvent and metal parts. A cot, a blanket, a jug, a cup. The window looked toward the lower outfall, where a narrow channel disappeared beneath a dark stone arch.

A blue work shirt and drawstring trousers had been folded on the cot. Vera changed into them before washing her other things.

The room had been emptied in a hurry. Rectangles of cleaner wall showed where shelves had stood. There was one forgotten wooden peg near the door and a row of small holes where another shelf had been moved more than once. From the other side of the partition came the wet slap of clothing being wrung out.

The woman who brought the blanket showed her how the window catch worked. It stuck at the halfway point; lifting the frame eased it. She demonstrated, waited for Vera to try, and left the window open a finger's width.

"The laundry starts early," she said. "That wall gets warm. You can put the boots there."

Vera thanked her. After the door shut, she moved the boots to the warm wall.

Vera washed the dust out of her hair. She cleaned the salt from the knife and dried it carefully. There was a rust spot near the hinge that had not been there before.

She opened and closed the blade several times, rubbing the hinge with the clean corner of the cloth until it moved freely. Then she folded her ruined sleeve inward so she would not have to keep looking through the punctures. The coat she had borrowed went over the peg. Her other things fitted in a line along the window ledge with room to spare.

Beyond the arch, a worker crossed a small footbridge carrying a lamp. Its reflection trembled in the channel, separated into three patches by ripples, and joined again after the worker passed. Vera could smell the evening meal from the kitchen. She had no idea how late it was by the time kept aboard the vessel.

In the glucose packet, the broken tooth gleamed blue.

She set it beside the unresponsive torch, then used the wax pencil to write on the back of her copy of the agreement.

Lio. Sister: Nell. Said he did not open the gate.

Below that she wrote: He told me not to touch him.

She did not add an explanation.

From the ward across the yard came a small regular click. Several others answered it, imperfectly spaced. Vera lay down in the borrowed clothes and listened to the devices take their time.