Ivara Quill sat at the corner of the long cedar table in the Tram pantry, her zinc math plate propped against an unread copy of the morning shipping manifest.
Beside her elbow sat a cold bowl of turnip and salt-pork broth that Doma Reel had brought forty minutes earlier. Ivara had not picked up the spoon. Her single hand held a brass-tipped graphite metal pen, moving down a ruled column of twelve names inscribed on the zinc plate with the careful care of a clerk.
These were the personal registry numbers of the twelve volunteer drillers who had swung sixteen-pound sledges to breach the granite wall in Tier Four.
Across the table sat Foreman Geth Marr, his hands wrapped around a dented mug of hot chicory tea. Five paces behind him, leaning against the whitewashed brick piers of the arch, stood three of his drillers—Jarek Thurm, Varner Crane, and young Hobb.
They stared into the empty air before their faces. They tracked the invisible margins of their personal status displays. They stood motionless, waiting for the radiant chime of an office correction that never came.
In the secret corners of their hearts, every man who had swung a steel bar against the nursery wall had harbored an unvoiced hope. That when the channel was cut and the child doubles dissolved into melted rock waste, the system would recognize the end of the theft. They had hoped that some fraction of their stolen strength—an extra ten feet of upright leap, a…
