On the second morning, Mara found Suri eating with a spoon in one hand and a broken fitting in the other.
“Which one's breakfast?” Mara asked.
“The one I can finish.” Suri put the fitting down. “Welcome back.”
They went into the east service passage. Mara had done some of its modifications herself. Here was a pipe she remembered installing while Ivo waited with dinner outside the door; there was the bracket she had meant to replace before she left. Somebody had replaced it. Their work was neater than hers.
Suri showed her a damp line along the thermal circuit and the brittle place where a shell inspection marker had peeled from the wall.
“It isn't one repair,” Mara said.
“No.”
They could isolate the leaky section. They could stabilize its neighbors, inspect again, postpone a failure without erasing the exhaustion in the metal that held the town's air. Mara put her palm against the wall. She had touched it that way a thousand times, listening through skin for something her instruments knew better. Today it was only warm.
A girl appeared at the passage mouth carrying a sock. “Have you seen the other one?”
Suri looked at the sock. “Is it particularly dangerous?”
“Mum says don't disturb you unless—”
“Look by the transfer. Things get caught there. Tell your mum we haven't seen it.”
The girl smiled and left.
“She's taller,” Mara said.
“They do that.”
They continued the survey. People made room for Mara, welcomed her, asked when to take luggage to Traverse. One woman said the bread was better now. Mara had no idea why she was being told that until she remembered having once complained about the bread, at length, to anybody who would stand still.
She could feel the place remembering an older version of her faster than she could become its present one.
Kestrel's service cupboard contained its own smaller thermal and recycling assembly. It did not share the ring's failing circuit. The shell kept its own air, the outer panels supplied power, and the communications link was already working. The machinery that kept it oriented and tended its orbit belonged to Kestrel too. The remaining weak point was the exchanger Suri had taken apart and left open.
“The exchanger?” Mara asked.
“Worn. I've been flushing it to get demonstration loads through. I wouldn't ask eight people to sleep behind it.”
“In stores?”
“There's a serviceable spare. We kept it when the old survey kit was reduced.”
“Why isn't it in?”
Suri glanced at her. “It wasn't going to grow hands.”
Mara shut her mouth. She had been about to ask the sort of question that sounded reasonable to the person with a clean case and a single job.
They found the replacement under tied covers in the hub store. Its inspection record and fittings were intact. They checked it together, laid out the adapters that belonged with it, and moved it where tomorrow's work could reach it.
The casing smelled faintly of the old survey room. Mara caught the lower end while Suri freed the last cover.
“What do you get out of this?” Mara asked.
Suri rubbed her knuckle, which she'd scraped on the storage rail. “A share in a little place.”
“There's little places on Earth.”
“Don't sell them to me. I've been there.”
“I didn't mean—”
“I know what you meant.” Suri closed the cover. “I've spent most of my adult life being the reason somebody else can forget where the water comes from. I want a job that ends before my food gets cold.”
“On Kestrel?”
“If everyone does it. If they don't, I'm coming with you.”
That landed with unexpected relief. Suri had a condition, not a creed. Mara wished Ivo had one she could bear to meet.
Later, alone, she took a final circuit through the outer residential walk. Fern leaves touched her cheek. A door stood open to a little table, an unmade bed, a bright yellow towel. Ivo's towel, or somebody else's. She had lived in a thousand shared assumptions about who used which thing. She couldn't face asking whether this was still their room.
He found her at the stair.
“The room's ready,” he said. “I moved some things. Not yours.”
She looked at him.
“I didn't know what you'd want,” he said.
“I've got my cabin aboard.”
“I know. But it's small.”
“Small is fine.”
He absorbed that. “Dinner?”
“Yes. Tomorrow's full trial if the repair holds. We need everyone in there, with what they actually intend to take.”
“Alma's chair?”
“Alma's actual intentions.”
His smile was brief and dear. She wanted to put her hand on his neck, and did not.
Before dinner, Mara went aboard Traverse and closed her cabin door.
Nobody knocked. No panel behind the bed needed checking. The ventilation hiss was somebody else's responsibility, performed without knowing she existed. She took off her shoes, tucked them side by side beneath a storage strap, and settled on the berth for a while with her hands empty.
Ivo would have laughed at the shoes. He left his wherever his feet stopped needing them. She missed that at the same moment she enjoyed being the only person deciding where a thing went.
On Earth, during the first extension of her contract, she had bought a little pot of herbs. Not for anyone else, not to contribute to dinner. In the second extension she had stopped apologizing for liking the rain on her window.
She lay back and stared at the quiet wall.
The ship did not smell of onions. After an hour she realized she was glad. Then she put her shoes on and went back to meet Suri for dinner.