Pell set the recorder on the blanket and waited.
Mara had heard him coming across the yard: his quick steps on the frost, the office’s back door, the pause in the doorway. She had pushed herself up against the cot’s iron frame to sit when he came in, and the dressing pulled at her forearm, a long hot tug from wrist to elbow, and she let it pull.
The recorder was the dormitory’s brass one, the size of a matchbox. Pell set it on the blanket over her knees. Then he took out his notebook and opened it and stood beside the cot with it, not sitting, the way he stood at the guild hall door with his blanket count.
“The clerk at the Directorate,” he said. “Halvek’s office. She explained the forms. I asked if I could record it. She said yes if her voice can’t be told.” He touched the recorder’s side switch. “It’s muffled. For witnesses.”
Mara reached for it with her left hand. The dressing stopped her. She reached with her right instead and turned it over and found the play stud.
The voice that came out was strange. Flattened and blurred by the muffle, so that it sounded like someone speaking through a wet cloth. But the words were clear.
