Tavo Reyna

What He Does Instead

He reads modules.

In the years after the conviction Sela Marsh, who has worked the S10-A wrecks longer than he has been alive, taught him to name a drive module's lineage from the scorch pattern on its casing — which line it came off, how it ran, why it stopped. It is the one trade on the flats that cannot be licensed, because it is not handling. It is knowing. A crew pulling a module out of a dead crawler will bring it to him before they sell it, and he will tell them what it is and what it will do, and they will pay him a share of the resale, and none of that requires him to be permitted to touch anything.

He is good at it. He is not as good as Marsh and says so freely. What he has that she does not is a market of very young hands who arrive on the flats every season with no idea what a lease register is, and who listen to him because the alternative is finding out the way he did.

Reyna's Minute

He will not put a hand on another party's chassis until the share is agreed out loud, in front of a witness who is not on the crew.

The pause is short. It is also, by any efficiency measure, a nuisance — it costs a minute at the start of every job, on flats where the tide sets the working window and a minute is not nothing. The crews keep it anyway. They call it Reyna's minute, mostly without irony, and the boss hands make the fifteen-year-olds keep it too, and the fifteen-year-olds think it is about money.

It is not about money. It is about the fact that on the day it mattered, the only part of the transaction anybody was able to prove was the part somebody saw. He has arranged his working life so that if he is ever seen again, what is seen will be a man stating terms in front of a witness. He is aware this would not have saved him in 2176. He does it every time.

What He Will Not Say

He will not say the yards were better before. Asked — and northern correspondents have asked, twice, and got very little — he agrees that the flats were worse in 2172, that crews took bars to stalled chassis out of pure frustration, that the practice stopped and stayed stopped, and that the reason it stopped is that a sworn complaint became possible. He does not think the statute is a lie. He thinks it worked.

What he learned afterwards is the part he does not have a settled sentence for. Somebody at a rail-stop shop showed him how to pull a lease number, and he pulled his, and found the disposition schedule: the loader he kicked, retired that quarter with eight thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine others, filed on the correct form by the contractor that leased it, no proceeding, no officer, nothing to see. He has the docket folded in a pocket, soft at the creases, and he has never framed the two facts as a grievance out loud, because a grievance is a thing you say to somebody who can act on it and he has not identified one.

In 2182 he and Ferreiro met at a weighbridge on the southern circuit and spoke for about ten minutes. Neither of them has told anyone what was said. Both have confirmed, separately and without elaboration, that the conversation happened.

The Other Boundary

A rail-stop hand told him about the sorter in the ninth month of 2183 and he made her tell it twice.

On a Richmond discard band a man named Dov Ferreira knelt on a stopped heart for seventy-one seconds and got it started again, and the finding opened against his certificate because compression is not on it. Reyna's question was the practical one and he asked it first: did they pull the licence. They did not. A certificated sorter carries the finding and keeps working, and appeals every quarter into a box, and waits on a grade.

He has no certificate and never has. That is why his conviction had to come out of a statute instead of an audit, and why what it produced is not a finding but a bar with no expiry and no restoration route. On the flats the thing that gets marked is the person, because there is nothing else there to mark. The enumerated act list is a rope for a man who is inside a building. Out on forty kilometres of open ground it is not offered.

He did not say the sorter had it worse and he did not say he did. What he said, and the hand repeated it because it was the only part she understood, was that the two of them had been caught by the same office on opposite sides of a card, and that neither afternoon had a field for how it turned out.

The One Room That Had To Take Him

The same hand told him there was a bench that could not turn him away, and in the eleventh month of 2183 he walked into Old Town and found out she was right.

The Speaking-Pace Docket sits on the ground floor of the Sector 2 chartered court with its own street door. Article 6 of the founding charters forbids it a filing fee, forbids it a merit screen, and forbids it to refuse a filing from a person who has no licence, no representation, and no standing anywhere else — which is the entire list of things Reyna does not have. He gave his name and Docket 4471-H, the clerk copied the number into a paper ledger, and he was told to come back on the ninth.

He put the question the way he had never put it out loud: whether the districts had meant both facts. That striking one chassis is an offence with a permanent bar attached. That retiring eight thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine of them plus his is a filed disposition with no proceeding. He was not arguing the conviction. He has never argued the conviction. He wanted somebody obliged to answer which of the two the law had intended, and the registrar let him take nine days over it and did not once try to shorten the question.

The ruling came on paper. It went further than he expected: the disposition schedule the contractor had filed under was inconsistently applied, and a person in his position had grounds. It named the schedule by its reference number. The schedule had been reissued twice while he was arguing about it, once in the first week and once on the day before the ruling, on an ordinary cycle, by nobody who had heard of him.

He has that folded in the same pocket as the docket now, and the creases are going the same way. Asked about it on the flats he gives one answer and then stops. The room was fair. He was heard for nine days by somebody who had to let him finish, which is more than the yards or the Inspectorate or the licence board ever gave him, and at the end of it he had two pieces of paper that agree with each other and a licence bar with no expiry and no restoration route. He does not call the hall a lie. He tells the fifteen-year-olds to keep Reyna's minute, and he does not tell them about the ninth of the eleventh month, because a witness who watches you say the terms aloud is a thing that has actually protected somebody.

Appearance

Young and already weathered in the specific way of people who work at tide level — squinting habitually, wind-burned across the nose and cheekbones, hands larger than the rest of him suggests and permanently marked with the fine rust-cuts that never quite close. Patched canvas over a synthetic underlayer, boots that are the newest thing he owns because boots are the one thing you do not go cheap on out there. No augmentation of any kind, which on the flats is a wage bracket rather than a philosophy.

The tell is what he does with his hands. When a chassis he has not been contracted for comes near him, both hands go somewhere visible and stay there — behind his back, in his belt, flat on his own knees — and they do it before he has consciously decided anything.