Sect Year 3 · ninth month · day 9 · Azure Stream Sect, lower lane, the east well
The sump was clear when the light came over the grain tower.
Lin had not expected it to be. He had sat on the top step through the last of the dark with the bucket across his knees and the split stave turned toward the wall. He listened to the water settle below him the way a man listens to a sleeper in the next room, waiting for the breath to change.
Somewhere in the night it had stopped moving. Now it lay flat and black under the lip, a round eye of water with the stone showing pale all around it. The grey film that had covered the cut steps had been scraped down to the bone.
The rope lay coiled along the top of the wall where the runners had left it. They had let it down in the dead of the night, when the families had no other lane to walk. Then they had sat down against it and slept, one with his head on his knees and the other with his lantern still lit at his feet.
The flame was going thin in the new light. Pei slept upright against the well-stones with her arms folded and her chin on her chest. She hadn’t gone home, and she hadn’t said she would stay. She had simply sat down beside the crank winch at some point in the night…
