Crystals were flaring end to end along the relic’s casing when Vos came back into the yard on the morning of the fifth day, and the thing wasn’t idling at her hip anymore.
She held it out in front of her in both hands.
“Everybody out,” she said.
“Rows.
Now.
Nobody works today.” The administrator came at a half-jog with his tunic collar open.
“We have a quota.” “You have a corpse count and an inventory discrepancy, and I have a contract that ends in two days.” She didn’t slow.
“Rows.” Kael came out with the rest and took his place fourth from the end of the third row, arm bandaged under a stolen sleeve, and he watched the crystals and did arithmetic.
She had recalibrated it.
That was clear from the pulse alone, a faster and harder rhythm than the slow sweep she’d run on the day she landed.
She had fed the instrument the yard.
Not presence now.
Residue.
The mark a channel leaves behind when it opens and closes inside a heartbeat, and there was exactly one such mark on this planet, and it was scorched into the dirt forty paces from where he was standing.
She started at the top of the line.
The dampening had held twice.
Both times it had been the body doing something the mind was only allowed to watch, and both times had been against an instrument tuned for a soul standing still.
He had no idea what the new tuning would find, and he had a bandaged forearm that would end the argument the moment anybody rolled the sleeve.
So he stopped planning to survive the sweep and started planning to end it.
The dead were the best material available.
A dead man can’t be questioned, can’t be tested, can’t stand up in a yard and deny what somebody says about him.
Whatever Kael put into the hole where Drest used to be, the hole would keep.
The relic came down the second row.
Eight men left.
“Ma’am.” Vos stopped and turned her head.
Only her head.
“You’re speaking out of a line I told to be silent.” “Yes, ma’am.
Sorry, ma’am.” Kael kept his eyes at the height of her collar, which was where a bondsman’s eyes went.
“It’s about what you’re looking for.
I think I know whose it was.” The whole third row had gone rigid around him.
The administrator made a small unhappy noise off to the left.
“Go on.” “The foreman.
Drest.” He let it come out slightly too fast, then corrected himself, which was what a nervous honest man did.
“The first day you landed.
Your instrument caught something, everyone saw it stutter.
It was him.” “The foreman who died in the explosion.” “Yes, ma’am.” Vos lowered the relic.
“That’s convenient.” “It’s the opposite of convenient for me, ma’am.
He’s dead and I’m the one still standing here telling you about him.” Something moved at the corner of her mouth.
“Say the rest of it.” “He’d been strange for weeks.
Talking to himself, mostly at the end of shift.
And the men who worked closest to him.” Kael let his gaze go sideways, once, toward the line, and pulled it back.
“They say he could move things without touching them.
Small things.
A tool off a bench.
Ore off a heap.
He knew to keep it hidden.
He was afraid of someone finding out, and then someone did land, and he was dead inside three days.” She was quiet.
“Who says,” she said.
“Names.” “The ones who’d say it are the two who died beside him, ma’am.” “Of course they are.” “Yes, ma’am.” She walked into the third row and stood in front of him, close enough that he could see the fine grit in the seams of her coat.
“You understand that if you’re lying to me, and I find out in an hour, I take you off this rock in a collar and sell you as something you’re not, and the buyer takes the difference out of you and not out of me.” “I understand.” “And you’re still standing there.” “Yes, ma’am.” Down the row, the bondsman with the split ear cleared his throat.
“It’s true about the tools.” Vos turned.
“Is it.” “He had a spanner come off the trestle at him once.
Everyone saw it.
He beat two men for laughing.” The man shrugged with his eyes down.
“We all thought it was the trestle.” That was the whole thing, right there, and Kael made his face do nothing at all while it happened.
He hadn’t asked for it.
He hadn’t needed to.
Every man in this yard had watched Drest skim their food for years and beat Pell to death over eight blocks, and now the foreman was in the ground and there was an offer on the table to keep him buried under something worse.
Nobody was going to defend him.
Nobody was going to check.
Three more voices came in from the second row before Vos raised a hand to stop them.
“Enough.
I’ve heard enough choir for one morning.” She turned back to Kael.
“Show me where he died.” He took her to the scorched wheel.
The crystals came alive twenty paces out and by ten they were flaring hard enough to throw light on her boots.
Vos knelt in the dirt at the center of it with the relic held flat, and she moved it in a slow arc, and the pulse climbed and steadied and climbed.
“Strong,” she said.
“Very strong, and very short.
It went off and it stopped.” She looked up.
“Where exactly was he standing?” “Where your left hand is.” “And the two others?” “That side.
Both of them a step behind him.” She swept the two places and the crystals answered from all three.
Of course they did.
The residue was a wheel, and a wheel has no center to it that an instrument can name, and the woman kneeling in the middle of it was reading a mark that had been made by a man three meters away with his hand out.
“He was untrained,” Vos said, half to herself.
“Completely untrained.
This isn’t a strike, it’s a rupture.
He went off like a pressure vessel.” She stood and beat the dust off her knees with one hand.
“That’s what an unfound one does eventually.
Every time.
It’s why I get to the young ones first.” “Ma’am.” “Don’t.” She was still looking at the ground.
“You’ve done your part.
Don’t add to it.” Kael shut his mouth, which was the only correct move left and also the hardest.
She stayed in the yard another hour, running the relic over the burn from six angles and putting each read into her slate, and the whole time her face got flatter.
Kael watched from the water line and read the account she was building.
A find, confirmed.
A find, deceased.
Four days of a two-day contract spent, a buyer waiting on the other end of a hyperspace lane, and nothing in the hold to show for it but data.
The administrator eventually risked approaching her.
“Then it’s concluded.” “It’s concluded badly.
There’s no commission on a corpse.” “The corporation would still consider the visit productive, surely.
A hazard identified.
A liability removed.” “Your hazard removed himself, and he took two of your paid heads with him, and I get nothing for either.” She snapped the slate shut.
“Release your line.
I’m off this rock at dawn.” “You’ll file the find, though.
For the record.” “I’ll file that a wild one burned out in a mining yard on a world nobody has heard of.
Somebody in an office will read that as three quarters of a million credits going up in dust, and they will be correct.” The rows broke.
Men went back to the barrows and the sorting line with the loose walk of people who had been holding still too long, and one or two of them looked at Kael as they passed, and looked away fast.
He stood where he was and let the whole thing set in his chest.
He had lost every straight fight available to him on this world.
He had no control over the arc, no cloak he could raise on purpose, no weapon, no standing, and a bad leg.
And he had just turned a professional hunter off his own scent by handing her a dead man to be satisfied with.
The lie had worked because it was mostly true.
Drest had been at the center.
Drest had died in it.
Everything Kael added had gone into a space the facts had already dug.
That was a tool.
That was the first tool he had ever picked up here that didn’t burn his arm off when he used it.
He was still standing in the sun with that thought when the pull came back, the one that had been touching at his attention since the night after the cave-in, southward and low and patient, and this time it arrived with something almost like a direction attached to it.
Kael turned toward it before he had decided to, and across the yard Vos’s freighter began powering its struts up for a dawn departure that hadn’t yet happened.