Location:Wild Confederacy — The Northern Flats, The Bore Site
Date/Time:TC1858.02.13 – TC1858.02.14
The broth tasted of the pan.
Not the slurry. The iron. The pan woman kept a smaller pot hooked over the corner of the fire trench where the heat came up hardest, and whatever went into it came out tasting of smoke and scorched metal and, faintly, of the mix, because nothing on the flats didn't. Mei drank it anyway, standing on the pit branch with both hands around the cup, and it scalded going down, and she was glad of every bit of the scald.
"You never asked my name," the pan woman said.
Mei looked at her over the cup.
"Ten days. You've screened my girl, you've held a kettle with me all night, and you've called me nothing." She didn't sound put out. She sounded as if she'd been keeping a tally and had reached the end of it. "It's Jessa."
"I don't ask," Mei answered. "At the shed. I don't ask anything I don't need for the sheet. It stops me wanting things from them."
