The young engineer had not looked up from his slate since he asked for the file.
He was still bent over it when the hearing ended, when Halvek closed his folder and the clerk stamped the slip and the hall began to stir, people standing, talking, the benches scraping. He sat at the end of the long table with the slate on his knees and his ink-stained fingers moving on its edge, and his lips moving too, very slightly, as though he were reading aloud to himself under his breath.
Then he stood up.
“I’d like to state something,” he said. “For the record.”
He said it quietly. But the guild clerk heard, and stopped packing his ledger, and the lawyer heard, and turned, and the hall, half-standing, heard the clerk stop and turned to see why.
The young engineer kept his eyes off Halvek. He looked at his slate.
“My name is Eshel,” he said. “Grid analyst. Directorate of Energy, Cinder, grid timing section.” He read from the slate. “I’ve examined the raw data file held by the guild under the serial read at this hearing. The official signal and the raw pulse, recorded to the same clock.” He read a figure aloud. Then he read it again. “The official signal’s interval is shorter than the raw pulse’s interval. The difference is at the fourth decimal place. It’s consistent across every beat in the file. It’s always in the same direction.”
