Silence held the lower vault for three beats after Vaska Ren finished speaking—the heavy, choking silence of an argument that used forty thousand living souls as a balance weight to crush any objection in advance.
Then Mina stepped out from behind the second bed into the center aisle.
She didn’t raise her voice, nor did she reach for the sealed Jade channels in her own wrists.
Instead, she walked to the small clerk’s desk beside the spiral stair, picked up Osen Tal’s oilskin-wrapped ledger—still open to the red-ink columns at the back—and carried it down the aisle until she stood four paces in front of Chief Examiner Vaska Ren.
“If these twelve beds are merely a temporary shield to protect the forty thousand people down the hill, Judge,” Mina said, holding the open red-ink register out where the blue floor-light fell across the thirty-one crossed-out names, “then explain why every single person you selected from the village rolls over the past four winters has an inward-closing spirit vein channel.”
Vaska Ren looked down at the red-ink pages in Mina’s hands, his narrow face composed.
“You read the congenital channel classifications in the margin,” Vaska observed calmly. “Most physicians outside the capital don’t recognize inward-turning backup veins without a Sky-slit gauge.”
