Pell sat at the long table of the Low Brace shelter with a pencil and the district’s paper map.
The guild hall. Cinder. Day twenty-two. Four days’ flight from Meridian and the well and Mara and the ribs. The long table had been pushed back against the wall during the shelter’s first weeks and pulled out again for the Council, and now it stood in the middle of the cleared end, with the bedrolls on the far side of the blanket curtain, and Pell at its head.
The district’s paper map was spread in front of him. The Low Brace, from the river to the cooling towers, every street, every block. He had drawn it himself for the survey, months ago, and added to it every week since: the shelters, the network’s houses, the clinic, the yard. It was soft at the folds.
The coordinated cuts had a timetable now. Pell had drawn the board for it on the yard office wall in pencil, as Mara had said, and it had held once, and he had inked it. Every active lamp stepping down at the same moment, every pulse, for a sliver of its light.
For Cinder, that sliver had to come from somewhere. From the shelters’ lights, partly. And the shelters needed to know which hours.
