Whitlow’s evacuation dock was full of luggage.
Anwen saw it first through the Fallow Hand’s forward port as the freighter nosed in under the shell’s lip: a long gallery of grey plating set into the shell’s flank, open to space at one end, with docking rails along its floor where the transports would have berthed. The rails ran the gallery’s whole length. And along them, stacked against the rails in rows, were cases.
Hundreds of them. Trunks. Canvas bags. Crates with rope handles. Bundles tied in blankets. Stacked two and three high, neatly, the way people stack things when they have been told to wait at a dock and expect to be called.
The transports had never come.
Anwen had seen abandoned places before. The old furnace halls at the river end of the Low Brace, shut when the mill moved. A guild shop on Cinder Row that had burned and never been rebuilt, with its tools still hanging on the wall in their outlines of soot. Those had been left. People had walked out of them and gone somewhere else.
This was different. Nobody had walked out of this. People had walked into it, with everything they could carry, and set it down in rows, and waited for a door to open. Some of the bundles had blankets folded on top of them, as if someone had meant to sit on them while they waited. One trunk had a pair of child’s boots tied to its handle by the…
