Pell sat at the back table in Halvek’s office with a numbered list.
The office was on the Directorate’s third floor, at the top of a stair Pell had never climbed before: a long room with tall windows looking out over the Low Brace’s roofs toward the cooling towers, where Hearth hung low and red. The windows had good glass. The room was warm. There were rugs on the floor. Pell had noticed the rugs first, before anything else, and written them down: 1. Rugs. Then crossed it out, because it was not what he had come for.
He had come for the emergency heat list.
The Directorate had issued it the night before, under Halvek’s emergency powers, when Hearth went red. A list of every household in Cinder entitled to emergency heat: fuel allotments for houses that could not keep warm on Hearth’s lowered output. The clerk at the front desk downstairs had refused to give Pell a copy. Then the guild’s lawyer had sent a note, and the clerk had sent him up here, to the back table, where a second clerk sat with the master copy and a ledger.
The list lay on the table in front of him.
