Page 132 of Zenith Court

I asked.

29

Astra

The lamp climbed from ember to working yellow on the Court’s schedule. By the third morning, I knew the breakfast tray would follow: warm bread, salt, soft cheese, water that tasted of the stone it had passed through. The rite-guard waited for my nod before she withdrew. The courtesy was part of her orders, but I nodded anyway. Refusing the tray would only leave me hungry.

Wash water came with the second tray. I stood at the basin and scrubbed to the elbow as if I had a shift to begin. Since the three lines closed at Tower, there had always been something on my skin—marble, apple, leather, faint or burning. Now the cloth came away smelling only of soap. I scrubbed anyway. My mother had taught me to keep clean wherever I found myself.

The metallic taste stayed gone. Bread was bread all the way down, salt only salt, and after every swallow I waited for the thin metal trace that had accompanied every meal since before I understood it. It never came. I ate because Jonah had ordered me to.

Every morning I remade the bed, though the corners were already tighter than I could manage. My hands wanted work. The room offered none, and I did not mistake that for an oversight.

At night, after the lamp died, Marrow answered one question through the channel. We had settled into that ration without discussing it. His voice rose from two floors deeper, the pride worn away from facts he had repeated too often.

“What’s holding my lines down?” I asked.

“The founding basin. Every room below the waterline sits inside the same fold.”

“Then opening my door wouldn’t free them.”

“No. You have to get above the water. Your door is irrelevant if you remain inside the building.”

“And the clean sheets? The cedar?”

Marrow was quiet for a moment. “Comfort costs less than resistance. I set the nine-day linen cycle. The Council argued about the cedar and approved it anyway.”

“You wrote this.”

“Yes.”

“And now?”

“Now I live under it.”

Every answer was information, but none offered a way out. I remembered them anyway.

Sleep came, but it felt empty. Since Tower, the three lines had always been there beneath me when I drifted off. Now I dreamed in sounds—water, cart wheels, my mother’s kitchen with nobody in it—and woke long before the lamp rose.

Each evening, two knocks came through the wall. I knelt at the grate. From two rooms up-channel, Caspian said, “Say the day.” I said it, he repeated it, and Jonah said it a third time from near the corridor’s turn. Last, in the voice he used to teach a salle, Jonah said, “Awake.” His breath traveled forty feet along the water. My wrist remained quiet.

The count drifted anyway. Somewhere between the fourth tray and the fifth dimming, one day blurred into the next, and I could no longer have sworn which was which. I did not tell them. I repeated whichever day Caspian gave me and let the two men keep the calendar I could not.

One night the channel ran colder. A second blanket arrived with supper, folded and unasked for. I had not been cold yet; someone elsewhere in the building knew I soon would be. When I asked Marrow, he called it clause fourteen: the cells were prepared for weather before the prisoners felt it. I slept warm beneath the extra blanket and woke twice with my thumb at my wrist.

The schedule broke eventually. Two rite-guards took positions in the corridor, and the First Chair of Zenith Court entered my cell carrying her own document case.

She took the chair without asking. The case opened across her knees into a lap desk, with an inkwell set into one corner and the day’s papers squared at the other. “Go on with your morning,” she said. “I’ve brought mine.”

I sat on the bed with my back against the whitewash and decided I would give her nothing. I had expected the decision to be the difficult part. Holding to it while she sat three feet away was harder.

She signed while she talked. “Flour contracts,” she said, turning a page. “A bridge in the north province needs re-decking before the freeze. Two successions in the minor rolls.” She signed a containment renewal—the kind of order that kept rooms like mine occupied—at the same pace, then moved to a dispute over a millrace.

“You’ve met Marrow, I expect. Along the water, after the lamps go down.” She did not look up. “We can hear the channels. The grates remain because I prefer to know what prisoners are saying and where.”

I watched her hands. Years of writing had raised a callus on her middle finger. Between documents she flexed the hand once, then continued. “I have stood this post since before your mother climbed this valley,” she said. “The guards change at the bells. Clerks rotate out. The kitchens sleep between meals. In the early years, I scheduled myself mornings away from the chair. Eventually I stopped pretending there was anyone to relieve me.”

“I would like to stop.” She said it without looking up. “I am told people keep bees. The Court licenses hives, so naturally I have read the forms. It looks restful. A hive does not put its queen’s name on every piece of work.” She turned another page. “You may stop looking for the hook. I am not here to offer terms.”