I asked Lyra at the kitchen table, with Sister Vell standing by the stove and pretending to stir a pot that did not need stirring.
"He wants to see you," I said. "He didn't ask for a reason, and I didn't offer one. You can say no."
"If I say no?"
"Then he waits. And he wonders why a girl with burn-glare won't be looked at. That's a cost too."
Lyra turned her cup a quarter turn on the scrubbed wood. She had not slept either. The pale smudges under her eyes made them look larger, and I could see her deciding.
"If I hide, he'll know there's something to hide," she said.
"Probably."
"And if I go, he might see it."
"He might."
"Then I want to go." She looked up. "But I want to do it my way. No lies from you. No lies from the Sister. If he asks me something, I answer for myself."
Vell stopped stirring. "You'll be wearing the band."
"Yes."
"Then you'll be telling the truth about the band. It's a burn band. I tied it for burn-glare." Vell's pale eyes were steady. "What's underneath is nobody's business unless you make it so."
"That's a very narrow line," I said.
"It's the only kind that holds," said Vell.
◆
Drum did not come to the kitchen. He sent Corvin to say he would wait in the long hall, where there was a table and a lamp and two chairs, and that the girl could bring anyone she liked.
She brought Vell. I walked behind them. Kaelen, at my request, stayed in the yard with a bucket and a look of complete innocence, which on him was a kind of disguise.
The long hall was bare and cold, with ten bedrolls rolled tight against the walls and not a single personal object in sight. Drum sat at the far end of the table with his gloved hands folded. A lantern stood at his elbow, shuttered. He rose when we came in, which I had not expected.
"Miss," he said. "Sister. Thank you."
"She's still weak," said Vell. "Fifteen minutes."
"Ten will do." He gestured to the chair across from him. Lyra found the table edge with her fingertips, as Vell had taught her, and sat. The band lay perfectly across her eyes.
I took the wall near the door. Drum glanced at me once and did not object.
"I won't be unkind," he said to Lyra. "I only want to ask a few small things. You may refuse any of them."
"All right," said Lyra.
"What's your name?"
"Lyra."
"Only Lyra?"
"It's the only one I've kept."
A faint pause. Drum tilted his head, as if tasting the answer. "Where are you from?"
"The Upper City. I left in a hurry."
"Why?"
"Because the people there wanted something from me that I didn't want to give."
I felt my own pulse in my throat. Every word was true. She had said nothing a person with burn-glare would not say, and nothing a liar would think to hide behind.
"That is honest," said Drum, softly.
"I've been told I'm bad at the other thing."
"Most people are." He reached for the lantern. "Miss, I'm going to open this shutter. It's a small lamp. If it troubles you, say so, and I'll close it."
"Captain," said Vell.
"Sister, I'll be gentle."
He slid the brass slide back, and a narrow bright bar of light cut across the table. It touched the edge of the linen band. It touched her cheek. He moved the lantern an inch to the left, an inch to the right, watching her face.
Lyra did not flinch. She sat with her hands folded in her lap and her chin level, and her breath came slow and even. I knew what it cost her. Heat answered to her without being asked. Every flame within ten feet was a small hand tugging at her sleeve.
"Does it hurt?" Drum asked.
"It's bright."
"Through the band?"
"A little. The way sunlight is through your eyelids."
"You've seen sunlight recently?"
"Not for six days."
It was an answer he could not argue with. He held the lantern still for a long moment, then closed the shutter with a soft click, and I let out a breath I had not known I was holding.
"Thank you," he said. "That's all I needed."
"Is it?" said Lyra.
His eyebrows rose. "Pardon?"
"You didn't need to see me to know I was blind. Sergeant Corvin's report would have been enough." Her voice stayed mild. "I think you wanted to see how I'd sit in front of a flame."
The hall went very quiet.
Vell's hand twitched at her side. I took a half step forward. Drum did not move at all. He sat with his gloves folded and his face unreadable, and when he spoke, his voice had lost its polite edge.
"That is a clever thing to say, for a girl who can't see."
"I can hear very well."
"I'm sure." Drum studied her. "What did you hear?"
"A man who isn't afraid of me," said Lyra. "And a man who's trying very hard to decide whether he should be."
For a long moment nothing happened. Then, slowly, Drum smiled. It was not the thin civil smile of the Pit. It was smaller and stranger, almost rueful.
"You'd have made a decent soldier," he said.
"I'd have made a terrible one."
"Most good ones say that." He rose, and bowed to her, a short precise inclination. "Thank you for your time, miss. I hope the glare passes quickly. Sister. Claimant."
He left. His boots made no sound on the stone.
◆
"He knows," Lyra said, in the yard, with the band still on and her hand on my sleeve.
"He suspects."
"He knows. He said it with the lantern." She swallowed. "He wasn't looking for a blind girl. He was looking for someone who'd been told how to act like one."
"Told by whom?"
"By whoever tied this band." Her mouth twisted. "By you. By Sister Vell. By anyone who thought it was a good idea."
"It was a good idea."
"It was the best of the bad ones," said Lyra. "That isn't the same thing."
I did not answer. She was right, and we both knew it.
Vell had walked on ahead to the Hospice kitchen. Kaelen leaned on his bucket by the furnace, watching us without seeming to, and in the far corner of the yard Sergeant Corvin stood alone at the edge of the rail line, looking at nothing.
"What do we do?" Lyra asked.
"We keep working," I said. "Fifty-three pieces by the day after tomorrow. If I'm busy, I'm hard to bother."
"That isn't a plan."
"It's a Tuesday," I said, and she almost smiled.
◆
I spent the rest of that day in front of the anvil, and it was the best day I had had in the Row.
Odda put a hammer in my hand at dawn and did not take it back. I learned to fold. Heat, strike, fold, strike, heat again. The first piece I made came out lumpy, and Odda tapped it with her knuckle, listened, and said, "Mumbler." The second was better. By noon I had a bracket she called a clearing of the throat, and by dusk one she grunted at, which in Odda was applause.
Tobb ran the crucible. Gurney, the old man in the nightshirt, sorted horseshoes by sound and was never once wrong. The two apprentices from the Velvet Quarter had stayed on, sleeping in the smithy loft, and by evening they were pouring molds with a confidence that made Tobb frown and then, grudgingly, nod.
Kaelen worked the quench trough, as before. Marrow ran the whole yard with a chalk and a drum. And none of us talked about the grey coats, or the tower, or the signal. I think we needed one day of iron and noise to put a floor under ourselves.
At the end of it, with my hands black and my arms aching in a clean, honest way, I walked the cooling beds with Marrow and read the chalk marks.
"Twenty-nine," she said.
"Out of fifty-three."
"Twenty-four to go, and a full day left."
"That's doable."
"It's doable," said Marrow, "if nothing else goes wrong."
We both looked at the dark mass of the second cooling tower, a black shape against the brass haze.
"Don't say it," I said.
"I didn't."
"You were going to."
"I was going to say," said Marrow, "that I haven't seen a flash from that tower since last night."
I stared at her.
"Neither have I," I said slowly. "I was too busy to notice."
"That's what bothers me."
◆
Sergeant Corvin found me after dark, on the furnace steps, with the day's soot still on my face.
She did not salute. She stood with her hands behind her back, and I saw that her coat was unbuttoned at the throat, a small thing and entirely unlike her.
"Pell's gone," she said.
I put down my cup.
"I posted him to the east wall at dusk. A short shift. I checked on him at the hour." Her voice was very even. "His post was empty. His cudgel was on the ground. His coat was still hanging on the wall hook, as if he'd stepped out of it."
"Left in a hurry?"
"Left without his boots." She looked down at her own. "I found them in the long hall, under his bedroll, with the laces still tied."
The cold crept up my back, slow and certain.
"Where would he go in his socks?"
"I don't know. I tracked him as far as the rail yard. Then the dust took the prints." She drew a long breath. "There was one more thing. By the wall."
She took a folded scrap from her sleeve and passed it to me.
It was a strip of grey cloth, perhaps a hand's breadth long, torn rather than cut. In one corner, in thread so faded it was barely visible, was a very small mirror. Beside it, three neat stitches, the beginning of a letter.
The same cloth. The same stitches.
"It was tucked under his cudgel," said Corvin. "Where I'd see it."
"Or where I'd be told about it."
"Yes." She met my eyes. "Someone wants us to keep finding this, sir. I'd like to know whether it's a message or a leash."
I turned the cloth over in my fingers. It was dry and clean, with no mud and no blood and no sign of a struggle. A mirror stitched in cheap thread. Three unfinished letters. A boy gone in his socks.
"Do you think he's dead?" I asked.
"I think he wanted to be found by someone," said Corvin. "And I think it wasn't us."
She did not say anything else. She saluted, two fingers to the brow, and walked away into the dark, and I stood on the steps holding a scrap of grey cloth and a growing certainty that whatever was happening in Cinder Row had been planned by someone who understood us better than we understood ourselves.
Behind me, the furnace ticked and settled. Far above, through six hundred feet of rock, a city that wanted me dead went on sleeping.
I folded the cloth into my coat, beside the copied pages and the black card, and went to find Kaelen.