Sel took the reading beside a sleeping mat.
The old warehouse sensor had been twenty-eight degrees. The room’s floor was hotter by enough to make the difference matter before anyone put it into a table.
A woman stood by the open window with her youngest child’s shirt in her hands. She had washed it three times that morning because the child kept waking soaked. Beyond her, two trays of seedlings drooped over their wooden edges.
“The return changed yesterday,” she said.
Sel wrote the time.
“Before that?”
“Warm. We liked warm.”
The woman gestured at the room. There was no useful argument about whether warmth was good in general. The floor beneath the mat was hot now. The drinking vessel beside it had lost the little coolness it usually kept. Nobody had chosen to make this room the lower end of Copper Terrace’s improvement.
