“Don’t approach it, Geth!” Ivara Quill’s voice cracked like a wagon driver’s leather whip across the stale air of the sealed bunkhouse. “That’s not your sister! Your sister Elsi is thirty-four years old. She runs the agricultural nursery beds on the eastern terraces of the Orchard Ward. We saw her name stamped on the vegetable delivery manifest in Doma’s kitchen yesterday. That thing on the mattress is her seven-year-old claimant record, bound to this feeder line when Chancellor Morn closed the turf!”
Geth Marr took a half-step forward, his boots dragging through twenty years of settled lime flour. His breath caught in his throat with a wet, choking hitch. His right hand shook wildly as he gripped the ash handle of his sixteen-pound sledge.
“Look at her face, Ivara,” Geth rasped, the tears carving jagged, dark channels through the white stone dust caked on his cheeks. “Look at the forehead. Look at the small mole beside her left ear. Our mother held her by the hand when the bells began to ring in the market. She was seven years old... She had three copper pennies tied into the hem of her apron...”
“It has her face because it was cast from her baseline on the night the sky went dark,” Ivara said. Her single hand held the copper-hooded lantern high, the green olive beam slicing through the floating dust to pin the figure on Bed 19 against the whitewashed wall. “When the Survey Board herded forty children down this shaft…
