The Gravity Between Shifts

Petra Vantol is the chief engineer of the Calliope, an old deep-space tug that tows freight barges across the black, and her gift is simple to describe and impossible to prove. She lays a bare palm flat on a machine casing and reads what the steel is doing: a bearing a tenth of a percent off true, a valve crawling out of seat, a pump singing the wrong note under its load. The plant has never lied to her. The cost is written into her body: after every deep reading her fingers tremble for twenty-four hours, and the tremor always arrives worst on the day she can least afford it.

Ivo Marek is the Calliope's cargo master. He carries a lead seal in his fist like a coin, and trusts one rule in the whole trade: a weight he has not weighed does not exist. Every figure gets counted twice, every hold gets walked before it gets signed, and every correction he ever made went into the margin column of the shift log first, initial and dated.

They serve on the same tug and opposite watches, and the only place their days touch is the eleven-minute handover at six in the morning and six at night. The official columns of the shift log are strictly business. The margin column is another matter. His notes are short and verb-first; her replies are flat as pump curves; somewhere over eleven days of black water, the two coldest instruments aboard a very cold ship began writing each other letters in the one column nobody else reads.

Then the numbers stop adding up.

The air reserves come up short, and the shortfall is booked against her department. The auditors arrive with polite paper and instruments that bless every tank her palm has questioned, and they strike her method from the record as subjective, without standing. Her own signature turns up on paperwork she never signed, in her own best hand. In the margins of a dead man's logs she finds an instruction left by her mentor, the chief who taught her everything and died in a lock accident four years ago: count the air yourself. Not the company's count. Your count.

Following it, Petra uncovers what the shortfall really is: sixty-one tons of cargo that exists on paper and not in any hold, riding her tug through a customs fence on falsified paper. The trail runs from a forged manifest to a factor house that buys its own contraband at auction, from a wet thumb that stamps every morning aboard to a signature shop that sells the names of the honored dead. Someone has been stealing her ship by the tenth of a percent, and someone ashore has been scheduling the theft like weather.

To prove it she must make a palm reading stand up in a room built to refuse it. To survive it she must keep counting out loud while the banks run dry faster than honest arithmetic allows. And to stay whole she has the margin column, the eleven minutes, and a cargo master who answers everything she writes and gives back everything she counts.

This is a slow-burn romance written in corrections and margin notes, and a fraud mystery counted to the tenth of a percent, on one old ship kept honest by two careful people.