Moving from the seed store up to the Bare Sorting Yard terrace above Shaft Number Three—Kezra’s second live Plot address (Circuit 31)—the afternoon wind grew colder. It swept down from the jagged peaks of the Spine with the threat of fresh snow. The sorting yard was a flat, sixty-foot expanse of bedded flat stone slabs where Alderfast miners had culled lead ore and fluorspar for ages. To the south, tucked into a narrow fissure between two towering cliffs of grey limestone, lay the mouth of the southern Coldwork gallery that Kezra’s first Quarter exchange had opened on Day 91.
The Bare Sorting Yard had been surveyed on Day 96, during Kezra’s first scouting of the basin’s northern defenses. Under the rules of her class, holding an active Plot address needed maintaining three cut-stone anchor marks carved into stable bedrock just outside the outer edge. Kezra walked to the northwest corner of the yard. There, a flat outcrop of native dark grey rock projected from the terrace gravel. With the toe of her boot, she brushed away a thin layer of frozen drift-snow. She exposed the three-inch square anchor mark she had cut cleanly with her cold-chisel eight days earlier. The cut was clean, sharp, and undisturbed. No rockfall had crushed the doorstep, and no frost-wedge had split the boundary.
