Work for Resting Hands

Neris arrived carrying an empty basket.

The guard at the customs-house door asked what was in it.

“Air,” she said. “You may count it.”

Ada heard her voice from the upstairs passage and ran down so quickly that she nearly collided with Serit.

Neris set down the basket just in time to receive the embrace. She was thinner than when Ada had last seen her, with shadows beneath her eyes and a raw patch where her apron strap had rubbed the back of her neck.

“Orla?” Ada asked before letting go.

“Alive. Still working. Under questioning whenever they can spare an official from being important elsewhere.”

“Because of us.”

“Because she helped people leave a place they shouldn't have been held. Keep the sentence complete.”

Ada nodded against her shoulder.

Neris had come under a permission to collect old customs route descriptions. Hald knew she intended to see them. He had not forbidden it, which made the permission difficult to interpret.

“He wants to know what you're bringing,” Neris said upstairs. “He also wants the hearing to be technically competent. Those wishes haven't stopped being compatible for him.”

Ren pushed a cup towards her.

“What is he doing to the Atlas?”

“Preparing the spine joins. The final counterseal isn't bound. The Chancellor wants as little left to do on the day as possible.”

“Are the local release marks still accessible?” Ysra asked.

“Some. The old preparation has held. The new perimeter layer covers two of the smaller sequences.”

Ysra closed her eyes, reading a page no one else could see.

“The western river set?”

“No. The northern carriage branches.”

“Then he hasn't found the whole method.”

“Or he has and intends to use it differently.”

Neris would not let certainty into the room merely because the others wanted it. Ada had missed that about her.

They worked at the long table. Neris drew the present arrangement from memory, marking the areas she had inspected herself and leaving the others blank. Cal copied the receiving schedules. Ada began the comparison column, then stopped when her pen slipped twice at the same turn.

Ysra saw.

“Put it down.”

“I can use my left hand for the figures.”

“Then you can use it after breakfast. Have you eaten?”

Ada had not.

The answer irritated her. So did the bread her aunt pushed towards her. She was old enough to travel the country with stolen evidence and apparently not old enough to be trusted alone with hunger.

Neris took her place at the column without comment.

Ada went to the window with the bread. Below, two city workers were lifting a damaged drain cover. One held a rope while the other adjusted his grip. Neither appeared diminished by needing the other.

She ate.

Later, a licensed binder named Iven came at Ren's invitation. He worked on market roads in the eastern wards and had four children whose shoes he described with the specificity of a man who paid for them. His hands were broad, his pen case meticulously clean.

“I won't bind a new national arrangement from a drawing someone made over supper,” he said.

“Good,” Ren replied. “Neither will I.”

He studied their provisional panels. He asked practical questions, objected to three assumptions and offered to inspect a fourth in person. When Ada showed him her quarry correction, he followed the line with the blunt end of a pin.

“Who watched the empty haul road?”

“Cal and the yard workers.”

“Who confirmed the old foot anchors?”

“People who used them. Three witnesses. I recorded the names.”

He read the entry.

“You left the receiving duration unspecified.”

“It was an emergency.”

“I see why you did it. It still needs an end.”

Ada fetched the later release record from Perrin's account. She had included it with the worker documents but not cross-referenced it beside the binding.

Iven waited while she wrote the missing reference.

“Better,” he said, and moved on without either praising her courage or calling her a child.

By afternoon, the room held four versions of the transition plan, two trays of food and an argument about which footpath a name actually described. Ysra listened from a chair with cushions under both forearms. From there she identified a reversal Ren had missed.

“You'll put the return against the next receiving page if you follow that mark.”

Ren leaned closer.

She swore once and corrected it.

Ada watched her aunt's face. Ysra had not held a pen all afternoon. The plan had still needed her.

Before leaving, Neris handed Ada a sealed note from Hald. The seal was intact. She had not pretended not to know what it contained.

Ada opened it at the kitchen table.

Hald offered a full training place, a guaranteed local licence for Sable Fen under supervision, and a review of the quarry charges. In return, Ada would bring the disputed records to a private technical commission and postpone their public presentation until the commission reported.

There was no date by which it had to report.

Ada read the offer twice. She pictured the workshop with its shelves unsealed, Perrin at the table, Ysra teaching without wondering when the next inspection would arrive. The offer was effective because it contained things she truly wanted.

She wrote her answer on the back, leaving his words visible.

A review after the lock is bound cannot restore the choice to people whose routes have already been assigned. I will attend the public hearing.

She signed her own name and asked Neris to deliver it only if doing so would not put her in additional danger.

Neris slipped it into the basket.

“This basket was less troublesome when it contained air,” she said.