They gathered at the yard bench in the afternoon, and there were more of them than the bench had been built for.
Mara stood at one end, under the chalk letters, with notebook I open on the wood in front of her. Sera stood at the other end with her back to the cold tray, her arms folded. Tavin was at the bench’s middle, on his stool, with his bad leg out, a tin of calipers in front of him. Pell sat on an upturned bin at the bench’s corner with his notebook on his knee. Eshel had set his case on the bench and opened it, and was taking out his gauges one by one and reading each one twice, aloud, under his breath. And two welders from the guild’s rota stood at the bench’s side: a stocky older man with burn scars on both forearms who said his name was Gell and nothing else, and a young woman with her hair tied back in a scarf who said her name was Brisk and then, when Sera looked at her, said that was really her name.
And at the end of the bench nearest the gate, a small grey-haired man in a dormitory clerk’s black coat, with a stack of tithe slips in front of him that he was reading faster than Mara had ever seen anyone read anything. His name was Wendell. Pell had brought him. “He reads tithe slips for the dormitory office,” Pell had said, “and…
