Black ink characters on the shoulder

She had learned the old script from a dictionary of salt-damaged pages on Ledger Station, where the air was thin and the ink froze if you left the pot open past midnight. Ilse wrote from the orbital farms, where the children were sorted by quarantine ward and their records were kept on paper because paper did not crash. She wanted to know what the old word was for the mother who came back. Ondine turned the card over and over under the lamp. The mark in the middle was not a question, as she had first assumed, but a short stroke that bent back on itself, the sign for returning to a place you had left on purpose.

She spent the rest of the shift grinding gall and cutting a fresh brush from a goat's tail she had kept in a tin for years. On a clean card she wrote the answer out in full, adding the line Ilse would need to hear: the stroke meant come back, and it had been carved on the doors of the old hospitals for exactly that reason. The ink was still wet when she rolled the card into the tube and sent it down the shaft, and she watched the little brass cap rattle away until the sound was gone.