The manifest said four hundred bushels of drywood grain, but the actual count came to three hundred and ninety-two, and the depot manager at Merin's Cross — a heavyset woman named Orvath who wore her authority in the set of her jaw — made Faro sign three separate documents acknowledging the discrepancy before she would release his payment.
He signed. He always signed.
"Settling shrinkage," he told her, which was the phrase everyone used and which meant nothing in particular, only that grain moved through the universe in ways that did not always add up and that the paperwork had to balance regardless. Orvath stamped his invoice with a force that suggested personal grievance and slid it across the counter without looking at him. The office smelled of dust and lubricant and the particular staleness of a room where the recycled air had been recycled too many times, and through its single porthole window Faro could see the Pale Meridian sitting on the depot's lower pad, her hull the color of old bone in Merin's Cross's ochre afternoon light, her starboard landing strut still sitting slightly wrong from the coupling issue that Samris had been threatening to address for the better part of two months.
He folded the invoice into his coat pocket and went back to his ship.
Samris was already underneath it.
He knew this because her boots were visible below the starboard hull panel — scuffed grey-green boots with the left toe worn through at the seam, a repair she had made three times and would not make a fourth time on the grounds that it was simply a waste of patching material. He could hear the specific rhythm of her working: the tink of a wrench, a pause, the soft percussive sound of something being struck once with the heel of a hand, another pause, and then the wrench again. It was a sound he associated with a particular quality of concentration that meant she had found the thing she was looking for and was now simply dealing with it.
"How bad?" he asked.
"Cosmetic," she said, from underneath.
"That's not what you said last week."
"Last week it wasn't cosmetic."
He leaned against the landing strut — the port one, which was fine — and looked out across Merin's Cross's freight apron. Three other ships on the pad: a battered long-hauler from the Denvik cooperative with its cargo doors hanging open, two dockworkers moving between them with a motorized pallet that groaned under its load; a sleek private courier vessel with no markings that had arrived after him and whose pilot he had not seen; and an older model ore carrier, Remnant registry stenciled on the flank in the angular script they used, that made him look away without fully understanding why. He had grown up around Remnant registry marks. They were common enough in the outer trade lanes. There was no reason to look away.
He looked at the sky instead.
Tillsward hung overhead, not yet fully risen in Merin's Cross's late afternoon — the agrarian moon's familiar blue-brown disc, its cloud cover dense over the northern hemisphere the way it always was this time of year, harvest season pending, the grain storage towers visible even from orbit if you knew where to look. They had been down here in Merin's Cross's gravity for six hours. In another two they would lift off and be home before dark.
Home. He turned the word over without examining it too closely.
"Manifested short again," he said.
Samris made a sound that was not quite agreement.
"Orvath had opinions."
"She always has opinions." A pause. The wrench. "Did you let her keep them?"
"Signed three forms."
"Good."
She did not say more than this because she understood, as she understood most things about him, that he did not particularly want to discuss the manifesting shortfall or the depot manager's opinions. He had been hauling grain between Tillsward and Merin's Cross for six years. He had signed a great many forms. There was nothing wrong with any of it. There was nothing wrong with any of it at all.
The pallet across the apron groaned again and one of the dockworkers said something in a loud voice to the other, and the other laughed, and Faro watched them work their way between the long-hauler's open doors with a kind of unfocused attention that he recognized, distantly, as the outward expression of thinking about something else — or more precisely, of not thinking about something, which required a similar quality of attention directed elsewhere.
He was thirty-one years old. He had spent the last six of those years running Tillsward's tertiary grain routes in a ship that required constant maintenance and a mechanic he hadn't managed to lose yet, and the six before that hauling cargo for his uncle Bilan on shorter runs, learning the trade the way you learned anything on Tillsward, which was by doing it badly first and slightly less badly thereafter. He was not unhappy. He was also not — and this was the thing he did not name, that lived in the particular quality of his gaze when it went somewhere distant like it was doing now — he was not, precisely, anything. He was Faro Besh, grain runner, unremarkable, and there was a difference between being content and being settled that he had never quite examined directly, the way you didn't look at a seam that might not hold.
"Done," Samris said.
She slid out from under the hull panel with the fluid economy of someone who had performed the motion ten thousand times and stood up in one movement, wrench in hand, her dark hair pulled back with a piece of wire she had taken from somewhere in the engine bay and never replaced with anything better. There was a streak of coupling grease along her left forearm and another on her jaw that she had not noticed. She looked at the coupling housing and then at him with the specific expression she wore when she was deciding whether to say something.
She decided not to.
"Good for the run home?" he asked.
"Good enough," she said, which was her version of yes.
The lift back to Tillsward took forty-three minutes and they spent them the way they spent most transit time that was too short for sleep and too long for nothing: Samris ran diagnostics in the engine compartment, Faro sat in the pilot's chair and watched the moon grow from a disc to a presence to the whole curved world below them, and neither of them spoke very much. The Pale Meridian's drive made its particular low harmonic hum, slightly uneven on the starboard side even after the coupling repair, a sound he had learned to hear as background the way you learned to hear the wind outside a house you'd lived in long enough.
They set down in Bilan's yard as the last of the day's light was pulling itself over the western ridge.
Tillsward's air always did something particular to him when the ship's ramp descended — the smell of it, which was wet grain and turned soil and the specific mineral sharpness of the cooling evening, a smell that was nothing like the recycled air of depots and transit corridors and the Meridian's own lived-in interior. He breathed it without deciding to.
Bilan's farmstead occupied a shallow rise at the edge of the western fields — three storage towers, a processing shed, the low stone house with its wide porch that ran the full length of the southern face. The fields ran out dark and vast in the evening, the grain standing dense and pale in the last light, and the house's windows were lit, amber and domestic, the way they always were when Bilan was expecting them.
He was sitting on the porch.
He sat there often, in the evenings, with his cup of something warm and the particular stillness of an old man who had learned to be still, and there was nothing unusual in it, nothing that should have drawn the eye. But Faro, crossing the yard from the ship, looked at his uncle and felt something shift in the quality of the evening without being able to say what had shifted. Bilan was looking at the fields. His cup was in his lap, both hands around it, and he was looking at the fields with an expression that Faro could not quite read from this distance, except that it was not the expression of a man who was simply watching the dark come in.
"Uncle," Faro said.
Bilan looked at him. The expression resolved, or perhaps concealed itself, into the familiar one — the creased, steady face, the eyes that had always carried something that might have been affection and might have been assessment and were probably both.
"You're late," Bilan said, which was his way of saying he had been watching for them.
"Depot manager had opinions."
"She always does." He looked past Faro to where Samris was emerging from the ship with her toolcase. "Samris. Coupling?"
"Fixed," she said.
"Good enough?"
"Good enough," she said again, in the same tone, which Bilan apparently understood in the same way Faro did, because he simply nodded and looked back out at the fields.
Faro stood at the foot of the porch steps and looked at his uncle's hands around the cup and at the way he held himself — carefully, he thought, without knowing why he thought it — and felt the shift in the evening again without being able to name it.
"Come in for supper," Bilan said. "Both of you. The pot's been on."
Samris ate with the focused appreciation of someone who had been subsisting on ship rations for three days and found the fact of hot food with actual vegetables an unqualified improvement. She and Bilan talked about the Meridian's starboard coupling and the general unreliability of that particular part's current manufacturing run, and Bilan asked after Orvath's disposition and Samris told him it was as usual, and the kitchen was warm with the smell of the stew and the low sound of the heating element under the pot, and Faro sat at the table that he had sat at since he was old enough to sit at tables and ate his supper and was, by every measure he had available, home.
He watched his uncle through supper the way he had watched him from the yard — not overtly, just the kind of attention you paid to something you were not sure you were reading correctly. Bilan was seventy-one. He was a large man gone thin with age, his hands still capable-looking on the table, his voice steady and warm when he spoke. He laughed at something Samris said about the long-hauler at Merin's Cross and the laugh was genuine. He ate most of his supper, though perhaps not all.
After, Samris took her plate to the sink and said she was going to run a second diagnostic on the Meridian's guidance array before she slept, because she thought she'd heard something asymmetric on re-entry and she'd rather know tonight than wonder tomorrow, and she shrugged on her jacket and went back across the dark yard, her boots loud on the stone path. Faro watched the window and could see her torch crossing toward the ship.
Bilan poured himself a small measure of something amber from the cabinet and stood with it at the far end of the kitchen.
"Sit a moment," he said.
Faro sat. He had already been sitting.
Bilan moved to the table — slowly, Faro noticed, with a care about how he placed his weight that had not been so apparent at supper — and lowered himself into the chair across from Faro's. He set his glass on the table and put both hands flat on either side of it, as though steadying something. Then he reached into the pocket of his work coat and set an object between them.
It was not large. Perhaps the size of two fists together, wrapped in a piece of cloth so old the original color was indeterminate, tied with a length of cord that had been knotted and re-knotted until the knot was less a knot than a small architectural complexity of rope. Whatever was inside the cloth held a shape that was neither quite round nor quite angular — not symmetrical in any way that made immediate visual sense. The wrapping was tight. Nothing of it showed through.
Bilan took his hands from the table and folded them in his lap and looked at the object and then at Faro.
"That's been under the silos," he said. "Since before you were born."
Faro looked at the object. He did not reach for it. Something in the quality of Bilan's stillness communicated, without words, that reaching for it was not yet the appropriate thing to do.
"Don't touch it yet," Bilan said. "I need to tell you some things first."
Outside, across the yard, the sound of Samris moving around inside the Pale Meridian — a boot on a gantry, the faint resonance of the diagnostic array cycling — came through the kitchen window that was open at the top. The heating element under the pot ticked as it cooled. Tillsward's night insects had begun their sound in the fields, the low collective drone that in childhood Faro had fallen asleep to so many times it had become indistinguishable from silence.
He looked at his uncle's face, at the hands in his lap, at the object on the table.
He left his hands in his own lap and waited.