The morning sun had no heat in it, but it turned the puddles on the Candlewake blacktop the color of cold zinc.
In the motel dining room, four tables had been pushed together into a long trestle. On the scrubbed pine boards lay the paper detritus of a county that had stopped keeping taxes: the green buckram 1961 Bellweather city directory; three heavy canvas binders containing the voter registration rolls for Dent and Texas counties; a box of hospital intake cards salvaged from the clinic basement; and, in the center of them all, the single stained page of carbon copy the transport worker had stolen from Haven Compound three days earlier.
Ada Bell sat at the end of the table, her wool cardigan buttoned up to her chin, her reading glasses tied behind her ears with a length of blue parcel twine.
Ada’s updated census recorded Nora, Caleb and Mae’s one protected night at Civic and their chosen daylight transfer with the westbound farm party after the boy’s dressing check. Three entries in, three entries out: the continuing Civic census remained forty-four.
Beside her sat Naomi Chen, a twenty-four-year-old former library assistant who had walked out of town with Ada when the civic shelter was formed. Naomi’s fingers were blackened with printer’s ink, turning the thin onion-skin pages of the voter rolls with rhythmic, practiced care.
