The final sheet inside Deren Vey’s folder was a narrow slip of coarse gray thick parchment, cut to the width of an official postal receipt and stamped with the blue three-cog seal of the High District Coroner’s Mortuary. It was a property disposition receipt, the cold, office reckoning of what an adult human being leaves behind when six tons of high-pressure steam and broken iron have completed their work.
Len held the slip close to the narrow sky-slit of Bram’s lantern. The ink was faded iron-gall. That turned the rusty brown of dried blood where the scrivener had pressed his iron nib too hard into the thick parchment:
DISPOSITION OF EFFECTS: RECOVERED FROM Star tower SERVICE PIT SEVEN. DECEASED: VEY, DEREN — CITIZEN CLASS FOUR (CONTRACT Land-mapper). DATE OF INTAKE: CYCLE 84, DAY FOUR, 08:30 HOURS.
Below the heading ran the itemized catalog, written in the neat, cramped shorthand of a dead-house clerk who processed five corpses before breakfast:
Item 01: One leather courier pouch, northern manufacture, oiled cowhide, water-damaged along the lower seams. Contents: thirty-four copper silver coins (country issue). Twelve stamped postal receipts (Tern Road Network, outside turf). One horn-handled pocket knife with two-inch folding blade (taken away under Emergency Weapon City law). Item 02. One pair brass glasses, double-bridge pattern, left oval lens fractured into twelve streaming fragments, right lens intact. Frames distorted by lateral crush force. Item 03: One dry-card road compass, three-inch brass casing, glass crystal shattered, magnetic needle seized permanently on a north-by-northwest bearing…
