The reality of the stolen route book hung over the central tram shed like a cloud of choking coal gas.
Len stood before the large slate-blackened chalk board mounted against the main brick pier of Track One. He couldn’t raise his left arm to point. The ash splints held the limb pinned tight to his ribs like a wooden truss. Instead, he cradled a six-foot jointed brass-tipped sounding pole beneath his right armpit like an iron-shod crutch. He used the polished metal ring to tap the addresses marked in yellow lime.
Around him stood forty-five civilian runners, track grease-hands, kitchen helpers, and ward messengers. Their gray woolen coats were damp with sulfur fog, their faces gaunt beneath the harsh, flickering glare of three high-mounted copper reflectors.
“The copy has forty-two names,” Len told them. His voice was raspy from the smoke. But it carried across the quiet shed with the cold, steady, unrushed pace of a postal checker reading a casualty list. “It has the delivery address for the fever households on Track Four. It has the cellar entrance behind Nessa Tern’s washing yard in River Ward. It has the shift rotation for Melli Dorn’s annealing kilns. It has the cipher we used for yesterday’s meal tokens.”
