The dining tables in the Candlewake lobby were pushed together end-to-end, their laminated maple tops covered with the physical inventory of the valley’s survival.
Luis Ortega arranged the medical supplies in three shallow wooden trays, handling the glass with his uninjured left hand while Noah set the dividers: thirty-two rolls of sterile gauze, five ampoules of morphine, one half-bottle of surgical alcohol, and eleven vials of porcine insulin, their fragile glass bodies nested in a box of cold pine sawdust to keep them from freezing against the draft.
Beside the medicine sat the fuel tally, written on a piece of cardboard by Noah: seven measured gallons of diesel in the flatbed’s tank before the next delivery, two gallons of kerosene in a blue jug, and three quarts of thirty-weight engine oil.
Next came the pantry count, audited can by can by Salma: nine tins of corned beef, fourteen pounds of dried pinto beans, six pounds of stone-ground cornmeal, and two stone crocks of salted lard.
Finally, at the head of the table, sat the brass register, flanked by Candlewake’s four measured unpledged one-unit work flasks.
Mara stood behind the desk, her sleeves pushed up to her elbows. The skin beneath her eyes was dark as bruised plums, her shoulders stiff with the ache of the two-mile snowshoe march from the school ridge. But her hands were steady as she dipped her steel nib into the black ink.
