Chapter 22: Day Four

The Bureau voided any lodging made more than five days after its seal. The folio had been sealed on the twenty-ninth, and this was the fourth day; if it missed the fifth, the junction and every name she had matched to it went back to being her opinion. The figures that had not closed since Meridian closed a little before dawn, in a scrap shed. Seren had worked through the night by one lamp, with Tavian Rook's drain survey and his one-handed copy of the junction weighted under a crate of cracked lattices. She had ruled the survey's line over the Ash street plan, then set down by address the raw intake sheets, the miners the clean ledger left out, and the stores no returned injury could account for. The three sets did not scatter. They lay in a band no wider than the Oldest Street, and the band ran…