A Day Borrowed

In the morning, somebody had put a table over the entrance to the lower gallery.

It held a kettle, three cups, a logbook, and an instrument that had to be read every quarter hour. A corporal sat behind it in a borrowed dressing gown. Each time he wrote down a number, he covered the page with a clean cloth to keep the drizzle off.

The table had one short leg. Someone had pushed a folded requisition beneath it. Water gathered in the fold, darkening the paper around a red stamp.

Across the yard, the evacuation had left pale rectangles where crates had stood and a long crooked furrow made by the wheel of a bed. A single slipper lay on a windowsill. A woman came out of the ward, looked along the sill, and picked it up with an expression of immense irritation and relief.

The rain made the camp look almost new from a distance. Close to, Vera could see the places where it found yesterday's damage.

Vera brought him a fourth cup.

She wore her old thermal shirt beneath the borrowed coat. The blue shirt from the gallery was still with Iona.

"Does that mean I'm relieved?" he asked.

"It means there's another cup."

"A careful woman."

The number had risen since the previous reading. Slowly, within the band Tavi had drawn, but risen all the same. Vera put the kettle back on its trivet and waited while the corporal finished writing.

Last night had acquired edges in the daylight. The six patients who remained were clearing again. The convoy had reached Bellwether. The gallery door was shut, the reserve under watch, and the camp still had a broken main outlet.

The signal confirming the convoy's arrival had been pinned beside the kitchen door. An orderly read it aloud whenever someone stopped to ask. By the fourth reading Vera could recognize the group of letters that meant arrived, although she still heard a different word when the orderly said it.

The translation in her head had become less startling without becoming less strange. She could understand a joke about the cart driver's mother and fail to identify the words written above the room where the joke was told. On Earth she had been able to follow a cable drawing in languages she could not speak. Here the drawings had become the part that felt familiar, and her own comprehension was the untested device.

She copied the word arrived beneath Lio's name on the back of her agreement. The two entries looked wrong beside one another. She turned the paper over before anyone came close enough to read it.

There was no bell for having avoided one disaster while retaining the next.

At breakfast, the cook gave Vera two eggs and told her they were not a reward. The second had cracked in the basket.

She ate both. Her arms hurt from the screw jack. That seemed so modest an injury after the things she had survived that she almost welcomed it. Then she had trouble raising her cup and stopped being philosophical.

"Closer," the cook said as she passed.

Vera looked up.

"Bring it closer. You're lifting with your elbow all the way out there."

Vera adjusted her grip and took a drink. The cook watched just long enough to establish that the advice had been accepted, then went back to the hearth.

At the next table, two workers were drawing the gallery operation with scraps of bread. The piece that represented Vera was much larger than the piece that represented the gate. One worker swept both aside when she glanced over.

"There was a handle," she told them.

The older worker looked embarrassed. "So I heard."

"A very long handle."

He restored a narrow strip of crust to the drawing. His companion considered the correction seriously, then broke off a longer piece. Vera turned back to her breakfast before she laughed into the cup.

Tavi found her there with a bundle under one arm.

"Your shirt," they said.

The borrowed shirt had been repaired across the shoulder. The patch was a different blue. Around the tear, small dark marks showed where fragments had struck and fallen away.

"I thought Iona kept it."

"She kept the notes. The laundry wanted the shirt. Institutions have competing interests."

They sat opposite her and took out a sketch of the gallery cap. The largest fragment had flattened at an angle. It had moved her sideways before it lost its shape.

"So it can push me," Vera said.

"Apparently."

"But not cut me."

Tavi pointed at her bandaged knuckle.

"That scraped slowly against a wall. The cap hit fast. Those may be different events for whatever surrounds you. We need more than one of each before we start making promises."

Vera turned the cup in her hands. "When that animal bit me, I could feel its mouth. Then something changed."

"Can you make it change now?"

She tried. For several seconds she concentrated on the skin between her thumb and forefinger. Nothing happened except that she became aware of a splinter in the table.

"No."

Tavi wrote that down with the same seriousness as the rest.

"You're enjoying this," Vera said.

"The part where a question gives us something to do? Yes. The part where the question comes wrapped in bits of the camp? Less."

They laid the cap sketch beside the test-bench drawing. The two arrangements had nothing obvious in common. One contained a carefully routed contact, the other a piece of metal moving through the air.

Vera traced the blank space around the outline of her shoulder without touching the ink. "Something happens here. I can't see it."

"Neither can I."

"I'd like to."

Tavi slid the drawings together. "Then we start by finding out what counts as seeing it. There are ways. None we can build between these eggs and whatever Dorr wants."

Vera let the imagined outline go. A small part of her had expected understanding to arrive with the decision to try. She would have laughed at that expectation in someone else.

They were still at breakfast when Dorr's messenger came. The captain had called a formal review in the signal room. Vera asked whether this was covered by their agreement.

"An invitation," the messenger said, with the care of someone repeating exact words.

She finished the eggs first, then hung the repaired shirt beneath the workshop awning beside her coveralls. Its newly washed seam was still damp.

The chairs in the signal room had been arranged around two tables pushed together. Iona sat beside Adra. Nell stood at the window. Venn occupied the chair nearest the door, her stiff arm supported on a folded coat.

On the table lay three separate files.

Rain tapped against the outer window ledge. The room's lamps were still lit, and their reflections made small pale cages on the glass. Nell stood between two of them with her arms folded around the map roll. The canvas bag she had brought to the gate rested at her feet.

Adra had put her own chair where she could reach the files without asking anyone to pass them. The clerk sat near enough to Dorr to hear a quiet instruction. Iona's chair faced the door to the ward. Vera noticed these choices as she took the remaining place.

She could have stood. She was beginning to understand what her standing did to rooms here. Instead she moved the chair so that it did not block anyone's way out, and sat with her hands on the table.

The first concerned the ward. The second concerned Oran Pell. The third had Lio Orr's name written on its cover.

Vera could read that much now. She had asked Nell to write it clearly the previous evening, then copied it until the letters stopped being shapes she had to remember individually.

Dorr began with the ward. The reserve could support the six occupied beds through the coming night if readings remained within the current band. That estimate required continued reduced use and no further upstream transfer. It was not a new capacity certificate for the camp.

"Put the conditions in the order," Iona said.

"They are in it."

He passed the page across. She read it before nodding.

Venn's report came next. The patrol had entered the engagement with the hounds below the effective strength required by its own schedule. Available did not mean recovered. The paper said otherwise because the roster had counted expected clearances as completed ones.

"I signed the patrol out," she said.

Dorr glanced at her.

"I know."

"Then leave that in too."

Adra made a note. Vera watched Venn's good hand close around the edge of the chair. No one had raised their voice. It cost the sergeant something anyway.

"You didn't fire," Vera said.

Venn looked at her.

"When the second one came. You looked at your wrist and stopped."

"Yes."

"That should be in the account as well."

The sergeant's mouth tightened. "It will be."

Vera could not tell whether Venn thought she was offering a defense or listing another failure. She tried again.

"I needed someone who could tell me where to put the rifle."

Venn looked down at the folded coat supporting her arm. Then she reached for the report and drew it closer so that the clerk could add the words without having to rewrite the page.

Oran's file contained the equipment inventory, the account against his cartridge, and Iona's description of his death. The service inspection confirmed that his regulator had been maintained. Its later destruction on Vera's wrist had occurred after his death, in a separate attempt to stop the second animal.

"The suspension on collection remains," Dorr said. "I have requested that both the cartridge and the rifle be charged to the defense account. I cannot approve the cartridge bond myself."

"Who can?" Vera asked.

"The guarantor's office in Bellwether."

"Then the family gets a copy of the request."

Adra looked up. "I have prepared one. It will travel with the notice."

The notice of death. Vera looked at the file and thought of the little brass tag, rubbed bright by a man's thumb while he waited for an alarm.

She had not known him well enough to invent a final message.

She could make sure no one invented a debt in his place.

Iona had brought a small envelope of personal effects. She placed it beside the equipment inventory. The cord of the brass tag showed through the unsealed flap.

The tag looked too small to have appeared so clearly on patrol. Vera remembered the faint tap of it against Oran's regulator and, more sharply now, the way he had tucked it beneath the strap when he caught her looking. She could remember that movement more clearly than the sound of his voice.

Adra checked the envelope against the inventory and slid it into the part of the file that would travel. Nobody asked Vera whether she wanted to keep anything.

Lio's file took longer.

The first report had described an unregistered carrier entering a restricted route and suffering a rupture. Nell objected to every part that made the event sound like a complete explanation.

"He used the marked spur," she said. "The board said it was quiet."

The clerk read back the replacement wording. The public reading had been copied forward from an earlier survey. The route's safe status was unconfirmed. The dead man's actions at the upstream gate had not been established.

"He said he didn't open it," Vera said.

"That will remain as your statement," Adra answered. "It cannot become a witnessed fact about a place you weren't in."

Vera disliked hearing it. Then she thought about the board on the spur, and nodded.

The clerk came to the last encounter. Vera repeated what she had seen, what Lio had said, and where she had touched him. Her voice stayed level. Once she had to stop and find the words again.

"I didn't know it would happen," she said. "He told me not to touch him. I touched him anyway."

Nell watched the clerk write it down.

"Don't shorten that," she said.

He did not.

The clerk sanded the wet ink. Everyone waited while he tipped the grains back into their box. Nell watched his hand as closely as Vera had watched Tavi withdraw the failed test section.

When the page was dry, Nell took it. She read the first paragraph quickly and the last one twice. Vera could hear the paper against her sleeve.

"This copy is mine?"

"Yes," Adra said.

Nell folded it along a line that missed the names. She put it into her bag above the clean shirt, then fastened the bag. Vera looked away before the buckle closed.

When the review ended, the three files remained separate. Vera found that unexpectedly reassuring. Saving the ward had not altered how Oran died. Killing the hound had not made Lio safe. Each thing had to be answered for in its own place.

Outside, the rain had become fine enough to hang in the air. Nell waited beneath the eaves with her survey case.

"The ceramic teeth you saw," she said. "Did they point toward the reserve?"

"Across it. There was an opening in the side wall."

"That's not on the recent plan."

"It was on an older one?"

"I don't know yet."

She took out a clean sheet. Vera drew the channel as well as she could, including the place where the eels had left it. Nell corrected the scale from the measurements called up the speaking tube.

For several minutes they worked without speaking about anything else.

The eaves were too narrow to shelter both the drawing and their shoulders. Nell kept moving the paper away from the rain, and Vera kept leaning to see it. At last Vera took the empty document case and held it above the sheet as a little roof.

Nell glanced up at the arrangement. "Higher. You're taking the light."

Vera raised it.

"There."

The lines beneath Nell's pencil made the gallery easier to understand than it had been while Vera stood inside it. She marked the cap, the stairs, the ledge where she had sat. Nell added the wall thickness and stopped at the side opening.

"You said the animals went through here."

"One after another. The big one first."

"Did the water follow?"

Vera closed her eyes briefly, trying to separate what the lamplight had shown from what she had assumed. "I don't remember. It was shallow. There may have been another drop beyond it."

Nell made the uncertain edge a dotted line. Vera was glad to have something better to offer than either a guess or silence.

Then Nell said, "I need to see the spur. The actual board. Not another copy."

Vera set the pencil down. "All right."

"That wasn't permission to follow me."

"All right," she said again.

Nell studied the drawing. "I may need someone who can stand where the reading was taken."

"Tell me what the job is when you know."

This time Nell nodded.

Vera found Dorr in the yard watching the reserve instrument. A signal slip had arrived from Vey. The request to suspend the overflow window had been referred to the district administrator for review. Lady Serrat would receive a delegation in two days.

"Will the transfer stop until then?" Vera asked.

"The message doesn't say."

"Send that question back."

"I have."

He folded the slip. "They will want to examine you."

"They can want it."

For the first time, the captain almost smiled.

"You have a day left under our arrangement," he said. "After that I will still have to decide how to record your presence."

"Record me as a person who hasn't agreed to enlist."

"And what do you want to do?"

Vera looked past him toward the repaired shirt drying beneath the workshop awning. Her own coveralls hung beside it. No one had found a coast she recognized, a working radio, or an explanation for the light beneath the sea. She wanted all of those things. Wanting them did not supply a next step.

Across the yard, Tavi was explaining the night watch to the corporal's replacement. Nell had joined them with the old drawing. Iona came out of the ward carrying a board with six names on it.

The company name on Vera's coveralls had dried stiff across the pocket. From where she stood she could recognize its shape but not read the smaller lettering beneath. She knew what it said. There were people who would know what that whole garment meant at a glance, who would ask why she had washed it with the pockets full and whether the torch could be salvaged.

She wanted to hear one of them be annoyed with her.

The longing had no useful direction. It pulled equally toward the sea, toward the inland city with its archives, and toward the dark place beneath the camp where animals knew a route absent from the recent map.

She looked back at Dorr. He had waited without offering a promise about getting her home. For the moment she was grateful for that.

"I want to know where the outlet goes," Vera said.

"That could become a large question."

"It already is."

She walked over to the table. The incoming watcher had never used that model of instrument, so Tavi began again from the beginning. Vera listened too.

Beyond the wall, the pale fans opened for the first time that morning. Only the row nearest the reserve. The others remained tightly shut.

Nell noticed. She wrote down the time.