Sera opened the sealed transcript in the evidence room on the fifth day, with the clerk watching and Mara somewhere else.
Mara had asked not to be there. She had told Sera so on the dock, the morning before: I’ve heard the header once. I don’t need to hear it again. Open it for me. And Sera had said fine, and asked for the clerk to be present, and the tribunal had agreed.
The evidence room was small.
It smelled of dust and paper. A table, two chairs, a shelf of boxes. A window high up with grey light in it. The clerk at the table’s end with her record book. Sera at the table with the grey steel evidence box in front of her.
The box’s seal was the one Lisan had watched Mara set at Lorn, long ago. Wax over wire, stamped. Untouched.
Sera took a tool from her jacket pocket. The Tern’s seal cutter: a small hooked blade on a brass handle, the rescue service’s issue, for cutting cargo seals in an emergency without damaging what was inside. She had carried it on the Tern for six years. She had brought it from the dock in her pocket.
