For fourteen in a row days following the restoration of the horizon, Ivara Quill didn’t sleep more than four hours out of every twenty-four.
Her command post had been established in the former chief dispatcher’s office on the mezzanine floor of the central tram depot. It was a long, narrow room with high arched windows looking out across the switching yards. There, the greasy coal soot on the panes had been replaced by clean box-shaped panes of fresh soda-glass heat-softened in Melli Dorn’s kilns. Three forty-foot drafting tables of unplaned pine dominated the center of the floor, piled with topographical linen maps, town high-pressure schematics, heat channel cross-sections. The thick, blue-ruled ledger books of the country grain reserves.
Every morning at six o’clock, before the steam whistles in the repair shops blew for the first work shift, the elected delegates from the seven town wards filed up the iron spiral stairs, their boots shedding gray road-slush onto the floorboards.
They didn’t bring political speeches, and they didn’t bring ideological petitions. They brought wooden tally sticks, blotted graphite sheets, and the unsparing arithmetic of survival.
From the Orchard Ward on the eastern terraces, Forewoman Elsi Marr stepped to the first drafting table. He laid down a bundle of dried, blackened fungal fronds bound with straw.
