The note passed. Unanimously, on the guild’s side. Halvek abstained. The panel recorded it without comment.
The Custodian’s model has a sign error at the outlet sensor. A correction has been made. Independent verification is in progress. The consolidation is held until verification is complete.
The clerk read it into the record. Then he put down his pen, and for a while nobody at the long table said anything. Eshel sat down for the first time in two hours, slowly, as if his knees had only just remembered how.
On the other side of the blanket curtain, the shelter murmured. Someone was singing to a child, barely louder than the stoves. The stoves ticked.
One of the guild leaders pushed her cup away.
She was a broad woman of sixty or so, with a dyer’s blue stain on the fingers of her right hand that no amount of scrubbing would shift. Mara had seen her at the hearing. She ran the Low Brace’s dyeworks, and the dyeworks had been one of the first to turn its vats down for the reduction. She had sat through the whole meeting without speaking. Now she pushed the cup of cold tea away from her across the table, so that it scraped on the wood, and looked at Mara.
