The envoy brought the newer records to the council table without calling them prisoner lists.
They had dates from the previous month, route marks, and handling descriptions that resembled the earlier post-opening manifests. Several names were absent. Others appeared only as a household reference or an abbreviated origin. The similarity mattered. So did the incompleteness.
Sera returned from the freight office in time to state both.
“We should investigate these movements,” she said. “We should not count every entry as a captive person before establishing the cargo.”
One of the relatives in the public benches made an impatient sound. Eli understood it. A person could spend so long preserving every limit that a room used the limits as permission to do nothing. Sera knew that too. She followed the qualification with a request for immediate preservation of specific dock and depot records, naming the locations the freight clerk had identified.
Bram rose when the chair asked about the handling code.
He could describe its use in the transfers he had escorted. It had marked a compartment requiring controlled access and a separate handover. In those instances, the cargo had been people. He did not know who had ordered the recent movements on the pages before them, and he would not claim that the code had never been used for any other purpose.
