Sect Year 6 · second month · day 12 · the Hanging Reaches, the reading hall
Dawn came grey through the high window and fell across the boards short of the tables, as it had every morning since the reading began. The slats were where they had fallen. Someone had walked across them in the night. Two had snapped under a heel, and a scrap of grey wool had caught on the broken corner of one and stayed there. Nobody had swept them up. Lin came down the steps with his coat still buttoned, and he stepped around the nearest slat without thinking, and then he thought about it and stopped where he stood.
Pei was already at the lamp with her witness book open on her knees. She looked at the floor, and then at him, and then she took the count up from where it had stopped the day before.
“Fourteen,” she said.
“Fourteen,” Lin said, and sat down. “Did you sleep?”
“Sitting up. Like you.” Pei turned a page of her book without reading it. “I heard someone walk over the slats in the night. I didn’t go and look.”
Nobody picked up the slats. The clerks came in one by one along the wall, and each of them looked at the boards before he looked at anything else. Then each of them stepped over them with great care and sat at his desk with his back to the place where the board had broken. The clerk…
