Halvek was brought before the local proceedings on the fourth day, with his folder under his arm.
The charges were read first. The clerk read them in full: discriminatory heat quotas in the Low Brace and the lower districts, set by his office against figures he had not verified. Concealed evacuation arrangements: the refuge lists, the berths kept off the public count, his own name on one of them. And obstruction of the Hearth warning: the months in which his office had held back the decline figures and called the warnings unverified.
Halvek stood to hear them.
He listened to every charge without moving.
He was thinner than Mara remembered from the yard gate. Greyer. His coat was the same, and the folder under his arm was the same kind he had carried then: thick, grey, with a clasp. He did not set it down. He held it against his side the whole time, as if it were part of the coat.
Tavin was in the gallery again. Front row. He had his hands on the rail.
Halvek did not look up at the gallery. He looked at the table, at the boxes on it, at the clerk. Once his eyes went to Mara’s stack, to the envelope on top, and stayed there a moment, and moved on.
