Page 39 of Zenith Court

“Witnessed,” Delphine said. I folded the chit and returned it to the inside pocket of my apron.

Sadie walked us to the door as though seeing guests out. “Tell them upstairs the room is exactly right,” she said, holding the warm linen. “I wouldn’t change a thing.” The bar stood upright in its bracket beside her. She did not look at it.

The twelfth linen belonged to a newer door around the far turn, iron-strapped and fitted with a grille. Through it, I saw a cot, a table covered in requisition paper, and the man from the Tower writing in a steward’s precise hand. Marrow was leaner than before, with gray beginning at his temples. He had filled the pages with hours, sounds, and deliveries. It was the same inventory he had once made of us at intake, turned now on the floor holding him.

Marrow came to his feet automatically, as he had for inspections at the Tower. Then he went still. A pull-cord hung within reach of his shoulder. He neither touched it nor called for anyone.

“Verita,” he said, as evenly as if reading a roster. His pen remained in his hand. “The linens run on nines. Count from this morning.”

“The recording basin in the session room draws from the laundry sluice. Same water, same hours. Whatever they take from me in session, the wash water carries it past your hoist.”

“That’s what I have.” He sat and returned to his columns. The pull-cord remained untouched.

We rode up with the used linen pressed between us, signed the ledger beneath our first signatures, and walked into the steam and clatter of the laundry. No one looked twice at us. I kept the folded delivery chit against my skin beneath the apron.

One lamp burned in our quarters while I reported the floor in order: eleven doors and the iron-strapped twelfth, unused bars, the hoist schedule, the session-room sluice, and Marrow’s warning. Then I read Sadie’s carving twice. Kieran did not joke. He lay on the cot with an arm over his eyes. “She was seventeen,” he said. Jonah asked for the hours and door count, then repeated them back once. Caspian looked at the copied message. “Keep that on you until we can answer it.” Delphine said nothing. She had already witnessed.

After the lamp went out, Sadie’s voice stayed with me: Tell them upstairs the room is exactly right. I wouldn’t change a thing.

24

Kieran

Marrow had given Astra one useful number: nine. He had counted the linen deliveries from inside his cell and passed the schedule through the grille. The Court changed the linens below the waterline every ninth day. For a few minutes, that routine opened a route into Sadie’s room.

The Conclave had added four hundred guests to the Court’s laundry. Caspian drafted a supplementary delivery docket in the Ashford hand, and Delphine countersigned it with her old credentials. By evening, the books showed a second delivery, provisioned and stamped. The false delivery needed someone to carry it down.

“Mine,” I said.

Astra had returned from the lower floor with Sadie’s carving and a report she could barely give.

“You went down to read her,” I said. “That wall was built to defeat readers. Send a performer.”

A current reached directly for Sadie’s Mark and found only what the rewrite permitted. A joke could make her anticipate without asking her to.

“If anything in her still knows what comes next, I can see it.” I lifted the docket. “And I know what almost dead looks like. Three years of practice.”

The joke failed. Astra watched me, her thumb moving over the place on her wrist where my line ran green-gold. She looked once toward the folded docket, then back at me. At last she nodded and released her wrist. Caspian gave me ten minutes. Jonah checked the shoulders of my borrowed livery twice and said nothing.

The next morning, I carried the hamper down in laundry gray while Delphine walked three steps ahead with the clipboard. At the waterline, the channel noise stopped so abruptly that my ears kept waiting for it to return. The silence carried the pressure of all that water above the ceiling.

Below, carpet swallowed our steps. Brass numbers shone on doors without visible bolts or bars. Beyond the turn, a floor attendant hummed while crockery touched a meal trolley.

For three years, I had imagined what would happen if Astra reached me too late. I had pictured execution, a cell, some honest form of ending. The Court would have given me this instead: a warm room, a quilt, regular meals, and enough rewriting to make me grateful for all of it. My countdown would have ended under a clean blanket while a file upstairs called the case resolved. I walked the carpet carrying Sadie’s sheets and knew how easily that room might have been mine.

A floor attendant met us at the fourth door, a broad woman with flour-white hair and gentle hands. “She enjoys visitors,” she said as she unlocked the door. “You have ten minutes while I do the far rooms. She’s no trouble at all.” She meant it as praise.

Sadie Corwin sat beside a lamp in a room where everything had been provided and nothing chosen: quilt, washstand, three approved objects on a shelf, each kept in its proper place. At nineteen, she looked rested and calm. She thanked me for the linens before I put down the hamper, then smoothed the quilt where she had risen.

I shook out the sheet with enough ceremony to excuse my being there. “I’ve stayed in worse rooms. Clean linen, hot meals, and nobody asking for payment.”

“They take very good care of us,” Sadie said.

“The locked door must be how they discourage theft.”

She watched me laugh, then laughed too—warmly, pleasantly, and a beat too late.

A living audience leans toward the turn before a joke lands. Sadie did not. She waited to be given permission. Her laugh came when the rhythm summoned it, the same weight and timing each time. I repeated a complaint about the Court’s two kinds of bread until the pattern settled between us.