Voss kept a room above a shuttered print shop on the quieter end of the docks - unmarked, unremarkable, the kind of place a careful man kept for exactly this sort of night - and it was there, past midnight, that the seven survivors of the harvest chamber were finally given water, blankets, and the particular gentle silence of people who understood better than to demand explanations before the shaking stopped.Wren sat in the corner with the boy's small body wrapped in a spare blanket beside him, unwilling to let anyone else carry that particular weight, and watched Voss move among the survivors with a warden's careful patience - checking injuries, offering water, asking nothing at all until each of them, in their own time, began to offer something back.The old man's name was Halric. He'd been taken eleven weeks ago, conscripted off a work line two streets from where he'd lived his whole life, and he spoke, once he found his voice, with the flat, exhausted precision of a man who had d

For three days, nothing terrible happened.It felt, to Wren, like the strangest stretch of his entire life - stranger, in its way, than the Ledger opening above Old Mercy's body, stranger than crushing steel with his bare hand. The seven survivors had settled into the tannery loft under Voss's quiet arrangement with its owner, healing by slow degrees. Tolan's grave had grass beginning to take at its edges. Pim had started, tentatively, to laugh again - a real laugh, not the careful, watchful half-smile she'd worn since the fence, but something looser, provoked by one of the older boys' terrible impression of a Cindergate warden's marching walk.Wren caught himself laughing along with her, once, on the second evening, and felt it happen before he could stop it - a warmth in his chest that had nothing to do with grief at all.He didn't notice the Ledger's silence until the third morning, when he reached for it out of habit, the way he'd started reaching for it every day since it arrived