The flatbed stopped at the yard gate an hour before dark.
It was a heavy freight truck with a flat steel bed, painted in the orchard consortium’s colors, green with a gold band along the side, and on the bed, lashed down in rows, were fuel drums. Mara counted them from the office door. Forty. Each one stencilled with the consortium’s mark, a tree inside a circle, and a number.
Four men in grey private-security jackets rode on the bed with the drums. A fifth was driving.
It had come up the river road from the depot and turned into the lane toward the orchard districts, the long way round, past the yard. And at the yard’s gate, where the lane narrowed, it had stopped. Because two guild workers were standing in the lane in front of its wheels.
Mara knew them. A welder from the River Mill works, a big man, and a woman from the guild shop, one of Anwen’s, small and wiry with her sleeves rolled. They stood side by side in front of the flatbed’s front wheels with their arms folded. They had nothing in their hands and nothing to say. They simply stood there.
The flatbed’s engine idled.
