Chapter 34: The Stair

Three days were left on the stay. The sheet was half a page, ruled with the edge of a ration slip, and it put the evidence copies in Mira's name and nobody else's. Kael signed it on the top step with a pencil stub wedged between his left fingers. The hand would not close, so the name went down as a lean line. Mira held the corner under her thumb against the doorpost. The wind came up the stair at the second bell and lifted paper. "The copies are mine," she said. "Date it." "The forty-eighth." "And the bell." He wrote the bell. Doss's note had let him up from the annex at first light. It would let him stay at this door till the second night bell. So far he had spent it on a sheet of paper and a pail of wash-house water. Nothing in either could be…