Bai spread the emergency roster across the station records table. Vessa stood opposite him with the quarry’s household book open in front of her. The pages were worn at the corners from years of use and marked with names, births, deaths, and moves between households.
The Registry list contained names copied from a tax roll written thirty years earlier. A few had belonged to people who were dead. Others now belonged to grandchildren who had never signed a furnace contract.
One of the quarry record keepers laid her finger on the next column. “These names were written for the old levy. The mark means a family paid grain, not that someone took a furnace shift.”
Bai asked how the list had been kept for so long. The keeper said each household had copied changes into its own book: births, deaths, marriages, moves between rooms. The Registry had taken the tax roll once and never asked for an update. The town’s pages held the changes the official list ignored.
Vessa found her mother’s name beside a duty mark. She ran her thumb over the ink. “My mother never worked above ground. She kept the lower cistern and taught me to measure the water. She was dead before this page was copied.”
