Second day of the curfew, it happened.
The house of Granny Sun by the well was raided. Eight enforcement men, white armbands, bayonets fixed: two in the yard turning things over, six holding the onlookers. Out of her stove bottom they dug half a sack of rice—buried by her son before he left, saved for the grandson. The sack wore two patches, one gray, one blue, stitches close and even, her own needlework. They hauled the sack off. Granny Sun took two steps after it, caught a rifle butt across her path, staggered, and her temple caught the door frame—half her face in blood.
The enforcement men pasted a paper seal on the way out: hoarding, against orders. Person remanded to the Control Committee.
The onlookers clenched their fists, and not one of them moved. Somebody shifted half a basket of dried sweet potatoes behind his back. The well winch stopped mid-turn with a creak, and nobody wound it again. The child-labor notice went back up on the wall—"in three days" changed to "in two," the ink traced harder than the first time, the paper's corner bleeding with it.
Chen Jin came on the smell of blood, well-water brine mixed into it. He sat Granny Sun up against the wall, and she grabbed his sleeve. "The rice was for the grandson—" The rest didn't come out. He looked at the cut on her temple, then at the paper seal—the brass chop smeared with paste at one corner, curling loose.
He said nothing. He carried her to the casualty shed on his back.
Before noon the enforcement men came again. Two of them entered the shed and pulled Granny Sun off the cot; the temple cut had just taken three stitches, thread not yet knotted. Wen Heng held the stretcher and wouldn't let them lift, and took a rifle butt on her forearm for it. She didn't cry out. She stood at the shed door and watched them load the handcart—three already lying on it.
Midday, the barracks. Three things laid out on the door-plank table: the command seal, the written pledge, and Zhou Zhengting's master register.
"Enforcement in the warehouse, fifteen men, one Jia running the detail." Zhou Zhengting turned pages, thumbnail clicking on paper. "I've logged them since registration day: two watches, changing at midnight. Duty room in the west courtyard, thirty paces off the storeroom. Two brass padlocks on the main doors, Everlast brand—I know the make. Snap a key inside and the lock's dead; you change the whole lock."
Lei Changgeng looked at him. "You log that too?"
"Occupational habit." Zhou Zhengting said. "I keep accounts, so I keep people first." Another page. "Eleven rifles, ammunition plentiful. And Jia can drink—of the wine sealed in that warehouse he cracked a case open himself; red-faced since yesterday noon. Bi Chengzhang doesn't lodge at the warehouse—days at the committee, nights at the top floor of the Port Office building, two men kept close. And the detainees never reached any committee. That place hasn't cleared a courtyard for holding. They're carted in and out of the warehouse and held in the west courtyard's side room, awaiting interrogation."
"Take the people back. Open the locks. Distribute the grain." Chen Jin pushed the written pledge to the table's center, tapping one line: if the wall holds, grain by head count, shelter district first. "Grain is the pledge's business. Tonight we open the warehouse."
Big Liu rubbed his hands. "I'll block the door. I've got the bulk for it."
"You hold the outer lane," Chen Jin said. "The door work goes to the lock."
Xiao Mao sat on the sill, whetting his picks on an oilstone. Big Liu leaned over: "Ten breaths? You can really work it?"
"Eight." Not looking up. "Two to breathe."
Lei Changgeng ground his cigarette out on his shoe sole. "Duty room's mine. They play pai gow before midnight, two hands in. They're loosest in the middle of cursing the second hand."
Afternoon, the casualty shed.
Wen Heng took the bandage off slower than she'd put it on. The scab had dropped, new skin flat and pale—this gash had closed like a month-old wound. It had been two days. She looked a long time, said nothing, didn't reach for the notebook; rolled the bandage into the basket; thought better of it, unrolled the cloth, checked the dates marked on it—and still didn't reach.
"No more dressing," she said. "Save it."
"Breakfast." Chen Jin set the food box on the medicine chest. Two flatbreads, a jar of thick porridge, saved by Xiaosui.
Wen Heng lifted the lid, looked, and didn't push it back. "A wound like this buys you out of breakfast."
"The porridge is Xiaosui's. Wasted food, wasted girl."
"Then eat." She took a spoonful. A bruise rode her left forearm above the cuff. He saw it, and didn't ask.
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"From holding the stretcher," she said herself. "Didn't hold it."
Stirring the porridge, she said suddenly: "Nobody dies tonight. You hear me?"
"What?"
"The registration crews measured my store today too." She didn't look up. "Men about to do something weigh everyone around them. What you're doing tonight, I don't ask. Two lamps lit in the shed. Left burning."
As he left, she said it to his back: "Don't pick at the shoulder."
Midnight. No moon.
The Ember Guard went in three groups: Big Liu and four holding the outer lane. Lei Changgeng and four sealing the duty room. Chen Jin and Xiao Mao, straight at the storeroom's main doors.
Xiao Mao carried his cloth roll, low along the wall. At the doors his hand went into the keyhole, gripped something, two turns—the lock went click, all inside ten breaths.
"Everlast springs. Stubborn-minded." He barely breathed it. "My dad's trick."
A second lock on the side room, on the people seized in the raids. Granny Sun inside, and four more—two young men, a man with a bad leg, a half-grown boy. Xiao Mao opened the lock; Chen Jin handed each one out. Five. Not one missing.
The corner of his vision blinked:
[Humans saved +1]
[Humans saved +1]
[Humans saved +1]
[Humans saved +1]
[Humans saved +1]
Five lines, and it stopped.
The duty room was never supposed to make noise. Lei Changgeng pressed to the window root and counted the pai gow through the wall; at the rise of the second hand's cursing he kicked the back window in and went through it, four men behind him, looped rope over heads—not one got a sound out. Then it broke: an enforcement man had come around the corner to relieve himself, met Big Liu mid-relay, and the shout died in his throat under Big Liu's palm—but in the scramble his gun spoke. One crack. The round parted the courtyard's clothesline.
The whole warehouse woke. Dogs went off in a chorus; the sheet-metal roofing hummed with it.
What followed was fast and not worth dressing up: Chen Jin came off the wall top into the middle of them, wine sweat and body sweat thick in the yard. He fired nothing—the rule for night work, no noise—stock, knife-hand, heel-hook, wrist bones buzzing with every contact. A man swinging a bench got halfway up the swing and was already seated on the ground. A man diving for the grain pile got lifted back by the collar and set down where he stood.
Fifteen men, fourteen down: bound in the duty room, flattened across the yard, a full spread of them. The only one still upright was Jia—drink not yet worn off, pistol half-drawn when his wrist was caught, and the pull turned him and put his face down into a pile of ledgers. The ledgers were gray with thumbprints.
"Talk." Chen Jin held him there.
Jia lasted under ten breaths. He never knew much anyway: "The berth's the people above pushing… written orders went straight to Chairman Bi's hand, we only pour the concrete… the wooden boxes, crated and nailed shut, we're not allowed to look at the manifests—say it's the ship folks' private freight…"
"Who's above?"
"Never seen him." Jia's face was in the ledger, voice mashed flat. "Not our place to ask. Even Chairman Bi listens upward. What are we."
A few more scraps leaked out: Bi Chengzhang lodged at the Port Office's top floor, lamp burning past midnight. Drank no wine, brought his own tea. Letters from above—read, then burned, ash tipped into the spittoon and carried out by his own hands.
Lei Changgeng spat to one side. "Burns his own letters clean. That's walls against his own people."
Chen Jin let him up off the ledgers. "Carry a message back. The guns are the port's. The grain is the port's. The warehouse, I've opened. If there's a crime to weigh—" he nodded at the command seal on the table, "tell him to come tear the pledge himself."
Jia straightened his collar on the way out and turned at the door. "The day the Council fleet comes back, you're the first one we settle!"
"Tell it to learn to slow down first," Chen Jin said.
The warehouse doors stood wide, torches in a row.
Zhou Zhengting came in with a lamp and read the books first, page by page, slower than anyone. Halfway through he closed the ledger and let out one cold breath of a laugh: "The books say two thousand four hundred sacks. On hand, a bit over two thousand two hundred. Two hundred sacks missing—and the pages are new, the ink is new."
"Moved where?" Lei Changgeng asked.
"Into the worksite. Or—" Zhou Zhengting lifted his chin toward the orbital port, "into those boxes nailed shut."
He said no more and turned to the distribution, a different man entirely: rations by head, three days each, casualty shed and shelter district first, every entry written, every thumbprint taken. A placard went up at the warehouse door—grain remaining, issued, balance—black on white.
"Look, all of you." He rapped the placard, voice gone raw. "This grain is the port's. The next seal anybody pastes, they ask this ledger's leave first."
Granny Sun drew new rice. She wouldn't take a new sack—wanted her own, the one with the two patches, the one the raid had thrown down in the storeroom corner. She ran her hand over the patches one at a time, and only at the blue one let them pour.
"The stitches are still here," she said. "The rice went. The stitches stayed."
Xiaosui drew two shares on the auntie's tag, the extra clamped to her chest. At the door she caught Chen Jin's sleeve and pushed the share into his arms. "Take it to Auntie Wen. Her porridge ran out at noon—there was only the bottom of the jar left."
Big Liu walked Granny Sun home to the well. On the way: "Auntie Sun, the rice came back—didn't all come back. What they ate, they ate. When I get wages I'll make it up to you." Then he clapped his own forehead.
The hands drawing grain shook. Not all of it was hunger.
Before dawn, the north wall. Half the searchlights toward the orbital port had gone dark; the site had stopped. An unlit boat slipped out of the harbor into deep water, oars light and quick.
"Getting away?" Lei Changgeng asked.
"Carrying mail." Chen Jin watched the boat's bearing until it vanished. "Seven days."
Lei Changgeng didn't get it. He didn't ask.
Bi Chengzhang was writing his ledger—and from tonight on, every entry in it, carried upward, would be entered against Linyuan.
Out past the wall the black tide rose and fell where it always rose and fell. Inside the wall, the coal of dark red on the barracks lintel still burned.
[Night total: Humans saved +5]
[Embers: 639]
The armor sat at 800. One hundred sixty-one short.
Chen Jin put the command seal back inside his jacket and came down off the wall. Day was coming. First stop, the casualty shed—to tell someone the night had passed with nobody dead.