Pell came to the yard gate in the morning with a notebook.
It was a different one from his usual. A pocket notebook, small, bound in brown card, thicker than it should have been because every page was full. He held it out to Mara in both hands as she came down from the office, and she saw that the pages were written on both sides, in ink, in his square careful hand, edge to edge.
“Household messages,” he said. “From the network. And the shelters. And people who stopped me in the street.” His fingers stayed on it.
He held it a moment longer, the way he had held the plank of bowls at the grave. As if letting go of it were a thing that had to be done carefully, or not at all. “I copied them. All of them. Since the bridge.”
Mara took it.
It was warm from his coat. The corners of its pages had gone soft from being turned.
She opened it at random. A message from a woman on Ferry Lane: thank you for the light, my son’s chest is better in the warm. A message from the bakery: the oven ran cold at the tenth hour on day thirteen; nobody told us the reduction would last past the minute. A message from a man on the Coil Stair: when the heat changes again, tell us first, before it happens, not after; my mother is ninety and she needs to know when to…
