The hearing room’s clock was six minutes slow. Kellan knew because the driver beside him checked the public transport board through the window, then took out his own watch and made a note.
“If they clear us after the shift starts, do I get the shift?” the driver asked.
“Ask for the order to say when it takes effect,” Kellan said.
The driver’s name was Davet. He had carried supplies during the evacuation and been suspended from the municipal depot when his supervisor received an allegation that volunteers had manufactured the flood scare. His hearing papers were folded into the shape of his breast pocket. Each time he took them out, he flattened them against his knee.
Across the aisle sat a woman with a private warehouse badge turned inward on its cord. She had also worked the evacuation. Her suspension letter did not use exactly the same words as Davet’s. Her advocate had marked the difference in pencil, though neither of them yet knew what her employer intended to do with it.
Kellan had come to understand what the finding changed in practice. Eli sat behind Tessa at the front with the team’s records, restless but leaving the presentation to the people whose accounts had been requested. Juno was prepared to answer about the failed equipment. Sera had supplied her dated observations without claiming the panel could infer a saboteur from them.
