Doma Reel didn’t look at the boy’s face again until she had counted the living cargo behind him.
In twelve years of running the central relief kitchens beneath the rail switching yards, she had learned that an organizer who let herself cry over one casualty. Meanwhile, the rest of the file was still in the doorway was an organizer who buried entire wards. A kitchen in a siege was a heavy-duty battery. It converted flour, turnips, and salt into human striking force, and if the line broke at the threshold, the fire went out for everyone. Her kitchen was forty women and three hundred dependents. She couldn’t allow sympathy to displace logistics.
Through the low back kitchen arch, Urel stumbled across the threshold, his boots dragging through the spilled greywater.
The chief technician of the country Star tower looked like a drowned corpse dug up from a coal dump. His wool tunic was shredded at the elbows, his face smeared with black boiler soot and dried salt tears, his breath whistling through his broken teeth in dry, rattling gasps that smelled of stale sulfur. Strapped to his back with two wide land-mapper’s webbing bands was his wife, Mara. Her head hung limp against his neck, her eyes half-closed. Her bandaged legs wept yellow serum through the lime-spattered linen. The steam burns from yesterday’s steam cooler leak had blistered the deep skin from mid-thigh to ankle, the raw flesh sticking to the cloth with every shifting step Urel took.
