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CHAPTER 111
The council took the river requests after the evening rotation, when the lamps were lit and the window was still shut. Dana had the folder open at the first page. It was thicker than it had been, and she had clipped the sheets in the order they had come in."Three items," she said. "The request from the two adults and the child at the bend, on the day it came. The child's examination at the line, and the council's decision on it. And the coalition's second part, which mentions a broken bridge and people on the eastern streets. I've marked what's observed, what's reported, and what's unknown on each one. Read them as you like. I'll record what you decide.""Whether we cross," Grit said from the door."That's the question on the agenda," Ezra said. "Whether we ever cross. We're not deciding it tonight. We're deciding what we have."Roz had her clipboard on her knees. Ines sat with her hands folded. Marlene was in her corner. Omar had his notebook open at the page with the dusk reading,
CHAPTER 110
The council sat that night with the lamps lit early and the window still shut, and Ezra let Dana read the item twice before anyone spoke."Request from the two adults and the child who came up the river road this morning," Dana said. "They've named themselves as Teodor Vance, Ilse Vance, and Mara Vance, age about seven. They describe a building across the river on Pell Street, and people still inside it. They ask for emergency aid for the child, who is hot and has a cough. The compound has no confirmed information about the building or its people. Nothing we've seen supports or contradicts what they've said. Roz has the child on her list from the verge. Omar has the water line at the reading he took at dusk. The rule says children go through the chair by need, under the line, and the adults stay on the sheet.""That's what the rule says," Grit said from the door. "It doesn't say the river.""It doesn't," Dana said. "The rule's about the gate. The river's not ours."Ezra looked down th
CHAPTER 109
The two of them came up from the river road in the late morning, on foot, without a cart or a runner's bag. Talia saw them from the storehouse steps. She could not tell at that distance whether they were a man and a woman, or two women, or a man and a boy. They walked close together, and when they reached the bend in the north road they stopped and looked back the way they had come, the way people look when they are not sure they will be followed.Then they came on.Grit was on the wall walk. He lifted one hand, and his men on the north walk turned and looked down the road, and the window stayed shut, and nobody moved toward the painted line. Dana came out of the storehouse with the registration folder under her arm and the pen on its string, and stopped at the table."Are they on the coalition's list?" Talia asked."Not that I've got," Dana said. "They're not carrying a sheet from the runner. Nothing from the envoys. I'd know the runner's walk by now.""Then they're not the runner."
CHAPTER 108
Ezra cleared the kitchen table after the evening meal and laid out what the compound had, one source at a time, the way he would have laid out the parts of a pump he did not yet know how to fix.There was not much. He had expected that. He had not expected the sight of it, four sheets of paper and a notebook, set side by side under the lamp, with the cold tea pushed to the edge of the wood and his bandaged hands flat on either side.The first was Grit's. He had said it from the wall walk on the morning of the lockdown, and then repeated it, almost word for word, to the coalition's runner at the north bend. The rail yard sheds down. The tower leaning. The freight cars overturned in the cutting. The bus still on the Harrison Street crossing. The steel standing. And one thing Grit had said twice, in the same flat voice: he could not see into the blocks beyond the yard, and so he did not report what was in them.The second was Omar's notebook. Ezra turned to the pages he needed and read t
CHAPTER 107
The six cases had been in the storehouse since the day of the run, stacked against the back wall beneath the high window, and Harold had walked past them every morning on his way to the bell without once lifting the cloth that covered them.He lifted it now, because Dana had asked him to."You're on the count," she had said at the registration table, with the folder open and the pen on its string. "You didn't carry them and you didn't see them come in. That's what I need you to say in the book, in those words. Then you'll help me weigh them, because you've got the back for it and I don't."He had not argued. He had looked at the cases, six of them, square and brown, the faded blue stamp on each side, and thought that once he would have made a joke about the back.Now he stood at the storehouse wall with his hands in the cloth and waited while Dana finished writing the time."Six," she said. "Read me the stamps."He read them. Blue, faded, the same mark on each case, the same words ben
CHAPTER 106
The bandage count was Vanessa's to do that morning, and nobody had asked her twice.Roz had put the box on the end of the storehouse table at the first bell and said, without looking up from the clipboard, "Rolls, pads, and the tape. Count them, write the number, and tell me if it's wrong. I'll be at the cots."So Vanessa counted. She had counted laundry for weeks, sheets and towels and the children's blankets, and she knew how the numbers slipped if you let your hands go faster than your eyes. She laid the rolls out in a row on a clean towel, one at a time, touching each one with a finger as she set it down. Twelve. The pads she stacked in fours. Three stacks, and one loose. The tape she counted twice, because it was small and easy to lose in a fold of cloth.Then she sat back on the stool and looked at the numbers she had written on the back of the count sheet, in her own hand, which was not as neat as Dana's but was still legible.Twelve rolls. Thirteen pads. Five rolls of tape.Ro
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