Marrow's nine furnace builders met me at dawn in the cold yard of Cinder Row, and not one of them looked like they believed in me.
They stood in a loose line with their arms folded, nine people of different ages and sizes who shared the same gray, careful expression. A bald man with a missing ear. Two sisters with matching burn scars on their forearms. An old woman who held herself so straight she seemed to be daring the wind to bend her. And at the end of the line, because nobody had successfully told her to go home, Wren.
"Three days," said the bald man. His name was Tobb, and he had the voice of someone who had counted every brick in the district at least twice. "A hundred brackets, a hundred braces, a hundred rails. From a furnace that hasn't poured in fourteen months and a district that has no iron."
"We have iron," I said.
"We have scrap."
"Scrap is iron that hasn't made up its mind yet."
Nobody laughed. Tobb's expression did not change at all. Beside me, Kaelen shifted his weight, and I could feel him thinking the same thing I was thinking, which was that I should stop trying to be clever before breakfast.
"All right," I said. "Let's start with arithmetic. Marrow, how big is a rail?"
"The Forges cut them in four-foot sections," Marrow said. "For the ore carts."
"Weight?"
"Sixty pounds. Give or take."
I wrote it on the back of my hand with a lump of charcoal. A hundred rails was six thousand pounds before we counted the brackets and the braces. Call it eight thousand with everything. Four tons of finished iron, and that was assuming we lost nothing in the melt, which no one in the history of metalworking had ever managed.
"Say five tons of scrap, to be safe," I said. "Where do we find it?"
"Everywhere," said one of the sisters, and then looked embarrassed to have spoken. "Sorry. It's just that it's everywhere. This was a foundry district. Everything that burned left iron behind."
"Then that's where we start," I said. "Nobody lifts anything yet. First we walk the Row and mark what we have. I want every pile, every broken cart, every boiler plate counted and written down. We don't know what we've got until we know what we've got."
Tobb studied me for a long moment, the way you study a stranger who has said something unexpectedly reasonable.
"Huh," he said. "Boy's got a head for it."
"I have a head for lists," I said. "Lists are what I'm good at."
◆
The walk took until noon, and it was the most depressing tour I had ever been on.
Cinder Row had been a district of rail and boiler and cart, and the fire had gone through it like a hand through a cobweb. Everywhere I looked there was ruin. Rows of warped girders lay in the dust like the ribs of dead animals. Ore carts had fused into lumps of slag. A half-finished boiler sat in an open shed with its plates peeled back, as if something had tried to crawl out of it from the inside.
But Tobb had been right about one thing, and the sister had been right about another. There was iron everywhere. It simply wasn't useful yet.
By the third hour, I had a map and a ledger and a rough total. By the fifth, I was certain of the answer.
"Four and a half tons," I told Marrow, over a bowl of thin soup that someone had pressed into my hands. "Maybe five, if the slag piles near the old rail yard are mostly iron and not mostly glass."
"That's enough," Marrow said slowly.
"For the iron, yes. We'd have to melt it down, strip the rust, cast the shapes. It's tight, but it's possible." I swallowed a mouthful of soup that tasted mostly of onion. "The problem isn't the iron."
"The coal."
"The coal." I set down the bowl. "To melt that much metal in that furnace, we'd need about as much coal as iron. Call it five tons, minimum. How much have we got?"
Marrow was quiet for a moment. "A little under a ton," she said. "Maybe less. It's what we burned last night."
"A ton," I repeated.
"We used most of what we had to light the fire."
"I know. That was my idea."
"I didn't say it was a bad idea."
"It wasn't a good one either," I said.
I looked across the yard to the furnace, a dark, hulking shape with a thin ribbon of smoke still rising from the firebox. Beside it, a group of children were stacking broken bricks into neat, optimistic towers, the way children will do anything if you let them think it matters.
"Where does the Row usually buy coal?" I asked.
"The Forges. Or Territory Five. Greaves holds the contract for the whole district."
"Of course he does."
"We tried Hask's people last week. They said they'd have to check with the Tallyman." Marrow's mouth twisted. "They didn't say no. They just didn't say yes."
I thought about the Broker's gentle smile and the three days she had given me. I thought about how a person might design a test they did not expect anyone to pass. Not with a wall. With a shortage.
"They're not going to sell us coal," I said.
"No," said Marrow. "I don't think they are."
◆
Kaelen found me that evening in the shell of the old foreman's office, sitting on an upturned crate with my ledger open on my knee and no ideas at all.
"You've been staring at that for an hour," he said.
"I'm doing math."
"You're doing despair with numbers."
"Same thing, in my experience."
He sat across from me on a broken stool and unbuckled the empty sword belt he had been wearing out of habit since the Sitting. The leather was worn pale where the scabbard usually hung. He turned it over in his hands as if he did not know what else to do with them.
"I walked the rail yard today," he said. "While you were counting."
"And?"
"Some of the scrap is good. Most is poor. A third of the rail sections are cracked through. If you cast from those without refining, the finished pieces will fail under load." He said it with the flat certainty of a man who had spent his childhood being taught to judge steel. "The Forges would reject them on sight."
"How bad?"
"Bad enough that Hask's inspectors would have a reason to turn down the order. A hundred of each, but not one piece that holds. You'd have met the number and lost the seat."
I closed the ledger slowly. "That's a trap."
"Or a coincidence."
"You don't believe that."
"No," Kaelen said. "I don't."
For a moment neither of us spoke. Somewhere outside, a hammer rang once, twice, three times, and fell silent.
"Can we refine it?" I asked.
"With enough fuel and time. We'd have to remelt the weak sections twice. Three times, maybe. It would burn more coal, not less."
"Which we don't have."
"Which we don't have."
I put my head in my hands. It was an undignified gesture, and I didn't care. The ache behind my left eye had been building all day, a faint, steady throb that had nothing to do with lying and everything to do with not sleeping.
"I could ask Lyra," I said, very quietly.
Kaelen said nothing.
"She could hold the furnace at heat. Steady, small, no more than a coal fire. It wouldn't show. She did it for the stove."
"The stove was one room," Kaelen said. "This is a four-story furnace in the middle of a district. Anyone in Territory One with a spyglass could see it."
"They already saw the fire."
"They saw a fire. They didn't see a girl turning winter into summer." He met my eyes. "Aren, you said it yourself. She's the thing the Empire would burn a city to get. If one voice on that Council learns what she is, you don't just lose the seat. You lose her."
"I know."
"Then you know what the answer is."
I did. I just didn't like it.
"I'm not going to ask her," I said at last.
"Good."
"I'm going to think of something else."
"That's the better plan."
"It had better be," I said. "I have two and a half days left to come up with it."
◆
I found the answer, if you could call it that, at midnight, sitting on the steps of the furnace with a cold cup of Marrow's bitter tea and a twelve-year-old who would not go to bed.
"You're not supposed to be up," I said.
"You're not either," Wren said.
"I'm the adult."
"You're not that old."
"I'm older than you."
"Barely." She was sitting with her knees drawn up, chin on her arms, staring at the coals. "My da used to say the Row's coal wasn't bought. It was found."
I looked at her. "What does that mean?"
"There was a bunker. Under the old rail yard. Before the fire." She shrugged, with the elaborate carelessness of a child who has just realized she may be saying something important. "Dessik sealed it off after. He said it wasn't safe. But my da said there was more coal in that hole than the whole Row could burn in a year."
Very slowly, I set down my tea.
"Wren," I said. "Where is it?"
"I don't know exactly. Somewhere under the yard. There's a hatch. It's under a pile of old cart wheels. My da showed me once, but I was little." She frowned, and for the first time that night she looked young. "You're not going to tell Marrow I told you, are you? She said never to say."
"Why not?"
"Because of what happened to the people who went down."
The ache behind my left eye pulsed once.
"What happened to them?" I asked.
Wren looked at me with the clear, level gaze of someone who had decided to trust a stranger, and was beginning to wonder if she should have.
"Nobody knows," she said. "They never came up."
◆
Marrow was standing at the edge of the rail yard at first light, staring down at a pile of rusted cart wheels as if it had personally insulted her.
"She told you," she said, without turning around.
"She didn't mean to."
"No. She never does." She exhaled, long and slow. "Dessik sealed that hatch two weeks before the fire. He wouldn't say why. I asked him once. He said it was safer if no one went down there. Then he said it wasn't safe for anyone to know it was down there." She shook her head. "I thought it was grief. I thought he'd lost his nerve."
"And now?"
"Now I think a man who was about to die had one thing left to protect," Marrow said. "And I'm not sure it was coal."
I looked at the wheels. They were heavy, and old, and rusted into the hard dirt as if they had grown there. Kaelen and two of the Row's strongest men had already begun pulling them aside. Each one groaned as it came free, a long metallic complaint that made the hair on my neck stand up.
Beneath the last wheel was a round iron hatch about the size of a dinner table. It was black with age. Someone had welded the rim shut, long ago, with a thick, ugly seam. But the weld had been cut. Cleanly. Recently.
The metal along the edge of the cut was still bright.
"Someone's been here," Kaelen said, very quietly.
"Not long ago," said Marrow.
"How long?"
I knelt beside the hatch and ran my thumb along the seam. The steel was clean and cold. There was no rust, no dust, nothing to say how many days or years had passed since it had been opened.
But beside the hatch, half buried in the dirt, was a single fresh boot print. It was too small to be a man's. Too deep to be a child's.
"Days," I said. "Maybe less."
"Who?" said Marrow.
I looked at the black circle of iron, and at the thin dark line where the weld had been cut, and thought of a gentle old woman in a rocking chair who had told me that the last two claimants were indisposed.
"I think," I said slowly, "that someone wanted to be very sure the Row had no coal. And I think they were in a hurry."
Marrow's good eye narrowed.
"Which means," Kaelen said, "that whatever's down there, they didn't take all of it."
"Or they took everything worth taking," I said, "and left the rest as bait."
Nobody spoke. Behind us, the Row was waking up. Smoke rose from a few thin chimneys. Somewhere a child laughed, then stopped, as if remembering where it was.
"We have two days," I said. "We can go down, or we can try to make iron out of nothing and watch the seat fall."
"Those aren't good choices," Marrow said.
"No," I said. "But they're the ones we have."
I stood, brushing the dust from my knees, and looked at the hatch one more time. It looked back at me, dark and patient, like something that had been waiting a long time for someone foolish enough to open it.
"Get a rope," I said. "And a lamp. And someone to hold the other end who isn't afraid of the dark."
Wren stepped out from behind Marrow's elbow. She had clearly been there the whole time.
"I'm not afraid of the dark," she said.
"You are twelve."
"That's not the same thing."
I looked at Marrow. Marrow looked at the sky, and said nothing for a long moment.
"She holds the rope," Marrow said at last. "She doesn't go down."
"Agreed."
"And you don't go alone."
"I wouldn't dream of it," I said.
Kaelen was already tying the knot.