Caldris kept them out of the front hall.
She led them out of the glass atrium by a door Mara had not noticed: a plain grey panel in the wall beside the lifts, without a handle, that opened when Caldris laid her palm on a plate beside it. Behind it, a maintenance stair. Concrete steps, iron rail, a single line of work lamps down the wall. It smelled of dust and machine oil, and the air was cooler than the atrium’s, and the light was the ordinary yellow of a working building rather than the white of Meridian’s lamp.
Mara knew stairs like this. The service stair at Hearth. The back stair at the guild hall. Every building that had a front for visitors had a stair like this behind it for the people who kept it running.
Caldris walked ahead of them, down, without hurrying. Her plain coat brushed the rail. She spoke without turning round, in complete sentences, with numbers in them.
“Eleven hundred and six households,” she said, “are on the refuge lists I released this week. For Meridian. The full lists, not the summary. Every household, every member, every priority code.” A landing. She turned and went on down. “Fourteen of those households have a child whose guardian does not appear on the form. The child is listed. The guardian’s line is blank.” Another landing. “I did not know that until I read the full lists myself. Three days ago. I had signed them without reading…
