From behind the cedar counter of the Survey Office, Ivara Quill watched Len Vey fold his approved copy of the discharge decree.
He folded the parchment with the swift, precise strokes of a trained postal clerk—two level folds, one upright tuck along the postal crease—and slid it into the oiled rawhide pocket of his courier tunic. His left hand didn’t lurch. It rested securely on the timber surface, braced by the stiff boiled-leather cuff, serving as an anchor. Meanwhile, his sound right fingers smoothed the linen edges.
Ivara leaned her single forearm on the counter, her dark, cold and exact eyes studying the young man in the uncurtained midday glare.
She remembered the first night she had laid eyes on him.
It had been an hour before the curfew bells on Day One, in the damp, crowded cellar beneath the tram sheds where Doma Reel had run her soup kettles behind barricades of sandbags. Len had stumbled down the brick steps like an animal driven before a brush fire. Nineteen years old, his postal uniform torn at the shoulder, a crude bandage soaked with dark blood binding a puncture wound on his left forearm, his knuckles white around the handle of a stolen medicine crate.
