The brass buttons on Dorian Keel’s charcoal tunic had been stamped with the double triangle of the Central Archive Authority.
Noah cut them off with a linoleum knife at the reception desk, dropping each disc of metal into an empty sardine tin. The sound they made—a dull, leaden clatter—was the only noise in the lobby.
Jonah and Gideon had returned from the school run before last dusk: eight passengers delivered, three gallons of the separately bonded diesel spent. This morning the remaining thirteen camp guests travelled to Civic in two escorted loads, eight and five. The two receiving slips lay on the desk, with every name matched. Civic’s count was fifty-two in its sixty-place hall; the school held Dan and eight new residents, nine in twelve warded cafeteria cots. No camp names remained on the waiting sheet.
The depot driver put four sealed six-unit cells on the desk and waited while Tessa checked the seals and measured twenty-four units. They came from a locked 138-unit relief stock charged before the collapse by the district’s ethical collection equipment, distinct from the exhausted county cache. The depot’s own occupancy supply was excluded from that stock. For the recorded exchange of spare tyres, the repaired starter and escorted transport work, the driver committed a total of eighty-four units to Candlewake and thirty-six to the school’s proposed gym and eighteen to Civic’s fixed hall. This first receipt spent forty-two of the 138; future loads did not count as delivered.
