Elian had begun to recognize the sound of a store opening.
Not the lock. That depended on the door. The sound came afterward: someone stepping into the cool space, pausing and drawing a breath that made the rows of sacks into something more immediate than a weight written on a board.
Hedra Mol did not pause.
She went straight to the third stack and pulled its inspection slip out of a wooden holder.
“This lot first,” she said. “Not the one by the windows. That stays where the ventilation suits it.”
Mira followed her inside. Elian came last, carrying the purchase book and the current emergency inventory in separate folders.
The distinction had become important enough that he no longer trusted two different headings in the same book.
Two thousand three hundred tons had been prepositioned for the emergency. Four hundred and seventy additional tons had arrived in the first two operating days, part of the nineteen hundred expected during the eight-day movement. People had already eaten from that provision. None of those facts became a winter reserve merely because someone repeated the opening total.
