The wood of the pantry frame stand table had absorbed forty years of spilled vinegar, salt water, and mutton fat. But Doma Reel kept it scrubbed with lye until the grain stood out in hard, pale ridges.
She didn’t look at the courier boy. Len Vey was still breathing like a winded pack mule, his right hand resting flat against his sister’s letter, his left arm held rigid against his ribs by its crude ash splint. He looked young, hollow-cheeked, and worn down to the gristle, exactly like the apprentices who used to stumble into her kitchen at five in the morning after a double shift on the lower tram lines.
Doma looked at Geth Marr.
The quarry foreman stood opposite her, his head ducked slightly beneath the low timber floor beams of the pantry ceiling. His single good eye was locked onto the broadsheet unfolded in the center of the pine boards. A massive, double-width royal gazette printed on stiff rag paper, bearing the dark indigo seal of the War Ministry in the capital. The paper was creased from three days in Bevin Soot’s hidden axle box, dusted with gray road grit. But the ink was crisp, dark, and undeniable.
