From the dark mouth of the hospital coal chute fifty yards down the cutting, Bram Ash braced his left elbow against the cold iron push-bar of the abandoned medical gurney.
He had watched Urel crawl through the black iron hopper with his burned wife strapped to his back. Her blistered ankles dragged through the coal silt. He had heard the faint, muffled scrape of the two little girls’ boots vanishing into the laundry cellar behind Tobin Callow. He had received his orders from Ivara Quill: escort the family, secure the Tramway kitchen outer edge, and leave the rear-guard to the courier and the land-mapper.
Bram had nine years of service records in the Judge’s Court at Gate Ward. He had stamped three hundred eviction orders. He had signed off on seventy-two claimant transfers when the night took young clerks. He had stood at the boundary toll with an iron club while women cried over taken away fever bark.
A man who had spent nine years doing the state’s butcher-work knew one thing with total, unbending certainty. You didn’t walk into a warm kitchen with a cup of chicory while two people who had pulled your dying daughter out of a cellar were cut down in a stone ditch behind you.
