Bram put two fingers on the handling mark and held them there until Sera asked him to lift his hand. The paper had already been folded across the ink. Another touch would not make it clearer.
“The western service road,” he said. “From the temporary enclosure to the covered berth. An officer from my old command led it.”
Sera wrote the route on one sheet and left a second sheet empty. The room behind the bakery smelled of flour and wet coats. Beyond its closed door someone moved a rack, the metal feet catching on a broken tile. Eli kept waiting for Bram to look toward that sound. He kept looking at the mark instead.
“What date?” Sera asked.
Bram gave it. It belonged to the weeks after the public gates opened. Eli remembered what he had been doing then and disliked the quick relief of discovering he had been elsewhere. His absence from one road changed nothing about the people taken down it.
“Did you see the passengers?”
“Yes.”
Bram’s answer came so quickly that the careful route description became something different in retrospect. He had not needed time to remember. He had needed time to stop choosing where the account began.
