Six Hours

Rian offered Seren his knife handle first.

She looked from the blade to the barred council doors. "Your negotiating method needs work."

"Cut the cuff from my left sleeve. There's shielding stitched inside."

Serrat was directing the witnesses into orderly rows, converting a mountain emergency into paperwork with admirable speed. Two guards had started toward them. Seren took the knife.

The cuff contained a narrow band of black mineral woven through wire. She knew the material: hushstone, used by furnace crews to dampen dragon harmonics. Private possession by an unregistered concordant was a licensing offense.

"You came prepared," she said.

"For furnace work. My priorities haven't changed."

She wrapped the strip around her marked wrist. The distant sensation of snow vanished. Only then did she realize she had also been aware of his heartbeat, steady and infuriatingly distinct from her own.

He watched her test the fastening. "Better?"

"Quieter."

"Keep it."

"You'll still hear me."

"Apparently you have a good deal to say."

His humor surprised her. So did the brief crooked smile that followed it, changing a face she had filed under severe. She almost answered with a smile of her own. Then she did, because Serrat was approaching and she refused to let him have every possible pleasure.

The nearer guard held a registration ledger. "Names, clan affiliations, and current marital obligations."

"Emergency statute nineteen," Rian said. "A certified vent officer may requisition necessary personnel until pressure returns to operating range. Interpreter Saye is necessary personnel."

"She's a newly marked concordant."

"She's also the only person here who understood the dragon telling us something was wrong."

Seren could have kissed the drafter of statute nineteen. Provided the drafter asked first.

"You cannot requisition me without my agreement," she told Rian.

The guard looked pleased.

Rian looked at her. "Will you assist me with the western return?"

She considered the offered distinction. Small, public, exact. "Yes. Until the pressure is safe."

He repeated those terms to the guard and held out his officer's seal.

Serrat reached them before the ink dried. "You have six hours. Afterward, both of you will report for supervision."

"And the record of the original clause?" Seren asked.

"Will be considered after the immediate danger."

Of course it would. Danger had delayed reform for generations. She took the emergency writ before he could add another condition.

The service stair smelled of hot pennies and damp stone. Rian went first until she told him she knew the route; then he moved aside without ceremony. She noticed his limp only when they reached the steeper steps. He placed his right foot carefully, saving the knee.

"Were you petitioning to evacuate Black Tor?" she asked.

"Three upper settlements. Their vents are failing."

"Your delegates demanded our heat reserves."

"Our delegates demanded whatever would keep them in this building longer. I need a corridor through Redglass territory. Before first snow."

Her clan had closed that pass after a border collapse killed seventeen road workers. Black Tor had refused the joint inquiry. Seren remembered translating the refusal, ashamed of the satisfaction she'd felt at making its arrogance sound precise.

"Why should we trust your safety estimates now?"

"You shouldn't. Inspect them."

He said it without softening the implication: somebody would have to go and look, and looking would cost time she had already promised to her own campaign.

At the bottom of the stair, a young technician sat against a wall holding a bloody rag to her forehead. Her name patch read TAVI. Twenty, perhaps, with a trainee's brass square sewn crookedly to her coat.

"How many below?" Rian asked, dropping to one knee.

"Two. The hatch won't lift. I went for the supervisor, but he said the council test couldn't be interrupted."

Seren crouched beside her. "Can you walk to the stair?"

Tavi nodded, then failed to stand.

Together they helped her onto the lowest step, above the steam drifting along the passage. Seren wrapped a clean handkerchief around the injured girl's fingers and showed her how firmly to press.

"That way," Tavi whispered. "Please."

The passage ended at a hatch with a red pressure needle trembling beyond its final mark. Rian studied the gauge, then the pipework. Seren put her ear against the stone.

Edda was speaking somewhere beneath them. Not words this time. A rhythm of pain and restraint. The dragon was holding the furnace lake back from the human galleries with her own body.

"We can't force this open," Rian said. "It would flash the water to steam."

"There are people inside."

"Which is why we can't force it."

She hated him for half a second. Then she hated the useful thing anger did: narrowing the world until the easiest action looked like the only one.

"Tell me what we can do."

He pointed to a handwheel beyond a split in the wall. "Lower bypass. I can reach it, but somebody has to persuade the dragon to ease pressure in stages."

"She isn't a valve."

"Then ask what she needs."

Seren stared at him. No officer had ever said that to her in a furnace gallery.

She knelt and pressed both palms to the floor, wincing at the burn. The stone carried Edda's enormous heartbeat.

"We hear you," Seren said into the speaking recess. "Two people are trapped above the western lake. We want to open the bypass. What can you safely release?"

The answer came slowly. Three breaths. No more.

Seren repeated it to Rian. He removed his coat and squeezed into the maintenance slit. Inside, his boot scraped stone. Metal complained.

"First," she called.

The floor warmed. Rian swore with considerable variety.

"Second."

The needle shifted back inside its scale.

On the third breath, something broke. She heard the unmistakable crack of a spindle shearing.

"Rian?"

"Still here. Don't open it."

She could see only his boot. Her own pulse slammed against the hushstone. If she removed it, she might feel what he felt, learn whether the wheel had crushed his hand. She nearly did.

Then she stopped. Fear did not give her permission.

"May I lower the shield?" she called. "Only until you get out."

A pause. "Yes."

She unwound the band. Cold determination flooded the edges of her awareness, followed by the precise ache of his shoulder. Not thoughts. Not instructions. A body's weather.

"You're pulling against a broken bracket," she said. "Turn your left shoulder."

He shifted. His boot moved backward. She caught his belt and helped drag him into the corridor as the pressure gauge finally settled.

They opened the hatch together. Two technicians emerged coughing, one supporting the other. Seren gave them her remaining clean sleeve to breathe through while Rian guided them to the stair.

Only after everyone was above the steam did she replace the hushstone.

Rian sat beside her, breathing hard. Their shoulders touched. She could have moved; there was room. Instead she became absurdly aware of the warmth passing through his wet sleeve and the silver scar at the corner of his mouth. Her shield was fastened. This distraction belonged entirely to her.

In his palm lay a small steel pin.

"The bypass was locked from outside," he said. "Fresh machining. This morning's work."

Seren thought of blue fire and Serrat's clean gloves. "Someone needed an emergency."

"And now they have two useful marked people to manage it."

From her coat she withdrew the scorched treaty fragment. One line had survived below the clause she'd read aloud: Each shall retain the means to depart.

Rian read over her shoulder, keeping a careful inch between them.

"I need your corridor," he said. "You need that sentence believed. I can testify to what happened upstairs."

"Testimony won't be enough."

"Then we find what is."

She looked at the pin between his fingers. Six hours until supervision. Three settlements awaiting a winter that would kill them. A dragon who had asked for a door.

"Terms first," Seren said.

He drew a clean sheet from his ruined coat.

"I thought you might say that."