The silence that settled over the Tram square after the constables dissolved was more dangerous than a riot.
Five hundred working men and women didn’t shout. They didn’t smash the glazed windows of the closed vendor stalls or overturn the coal barrows. They stood in tight, shivering clusters beneath the overhangs of the tram sheds, their shoulders hunched against the freezing drizzle, their voices merging into a low, nonstop rumble that sounded like groundwater rising behind a cracked stonework retaining wall.
It was the sound of five hundred people who had spent twelve years believing their misery was an act of national sacrifice, only to discover it was an office accounting trade.
Doma Reel stepped down from the staging cart, her heavy boots splashing into the gutter slurry. She tucked the nursery ledger into the zinc crate, locked the brass hasp with a padlock from her apron pocket. Then she walked over to where Len and Ivara stood by the tailboard.
“They have the truth now, Len,” Doma whispered, her gray eyes scanning the dark outer edge of the square where the shadows were already beginning to lengthen. “The truth will keep them from carrying Vane’s clubs, but it won’t keep the lamps lit. We have a worse problem than the constables.”
