The forty-first volume found in the zinc chest didn’t share the utilitarian pasteboard binding of the forty town harvest ledgers.
It was a slim, octavo notebook bound in heavy black oilcloth. Its edges were heavy with brass angle-plates and closed with a small, spring-loaded brass hasp. Stamped across the center of the black fabric in tarnished gold leaf—the ornate typography reserved for the personal clerk hall of the Survey Board—was an official title:
SPECIAL DISPENSATION Hall — LICENSED TRANSIT REGISTER. Young Escape PROTOCOL — YEARS ONE THROUGH THREE.
Len Vey laid the book flat on the clean cedar log, his thumb releasing the brass catch with a quiet, metal click. The paper inside was not cheap wood-pulp folio. It was smooth, watermarked linen thick parchment, ruled with fine violet guidelines and inscribed in the sharp, sloping hand of a private city court notary.
Beside him, Ivara Quill brought her single hand to the table, her land-mapper’s measuring tongs poised above the margins. Bram Ash stood by the door, his court guard stave barred across the timber, his ears straining toward the quarry shaft outside where the hoist bells chimed intermittently through the dark.
“The nursery roster,” Len said, his finger resting at the head of the first thick parchment sheet.
