Over the next few weeks the village changed, though Oren probably wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been reading the lists every day at the Archive.
It wasn’t loud.
Nobody stopped living, and the streets didn’t fill with weeping, which was what he’d pictured as a boy whenever someone said the word “war.” What happened was smaller and slower than that.
A chair went empty at somebody’s table, a shop stayed shuttered longer than it should have, and once or twice Oren heard a neighbor’s name in the past tense without anyone seeming to notice the verb had changed.
The tailor’s shop near their house had been shut two weeks, maybe a bit more, and somebody had put a padlock on the door, which Oren had never seen there before.
He asked Marin about it one evening.
She said the tailor had gone with the last batch and his boy was working on an uncle’s farm till his father got back, “or till somebody decides otherwise.” She said it flatly, with no cruelty in it.
That was just how people talked by now.
In the market he started catching bits of talk that he didn’t remember hearing so plainly a few months before.
A woman asked her neighbor whether she’d heard from her son since the letter a month back, and the neighbor said letters were slow these days, nothing to fuss about, and started in on the price of onions.
Near the edge of the square a boy about Oren’s age was carrying a small bag toward a waiting cart while his father helped him with a crate.
The boy was joking loudly, saying he’d be back before they’d finished complaining about how much they missed him, and people laughed.
It was a real laugh, mostly.
At the Archive it was easier to see.
The lists used to come every two weeks and now they came every few days, some with the names of men who’d already left, some still under review, some just corrections to earlier ones.
The whole thing seemed to be speeding up somewhere far off, and here it only meant more paper and longer hours.
The stairwell had started to smell of wet ink all day.
The supervisor dropped a new pile on Oren’s table, hardly looking up from it.
“Start with these.
The courthouse wants a confirmed copy of every name in the district by end of the week.” Oren started, and about an hour in he reached the page for his own village.
It wasn’t a preliminary list this time but an official copy of the review order, with his full name on it, his village record number, the exact date of his appointment, and a note at the bottom saying a copy would go to the summoned man himself in the coming days, to keep until the review.
He read it, then read it again.
He’d known for weeks his name was on there and that wasn’t the issue, it just looked different with the seal on it and the date typed out.
He was still sitting there when it occurred to him that he hadn’t filed it, hadn’t moved at all in a while.
Then he filed it, and took the next one.
He didn’t tell Marin.
He kept meaning to.
Every evening he’d think, tonight, and then somehow he’d be talking about the price of eggs or about Martin, who still couldn’t tell the seals apart, and the night would end with the sentence sitting exactly where he’d left it.
She noticed anyway, she always did.
“You’ve been somewhere else for days,” she said, putting his plate down.
“More than usual.” “It’s work.
The lists don’t stop.” “What lists?” “Names.
Registrations.” He kept it short on purpose.
“The Archive’s busy because of the situation.” She looked at him a second, then nodded and went back to her own plate.
“Makes sense.
Everyones talking about it.” Ten minutes later she was telling him about a woman at the market who wouldn’t stop complaining about the price of wool.
Oren ate slowly and was glad she hadn’t pushed.
That night, after Marin had gone to sleep, he sat in his room thinking about small things, none of them the courthouse.
Her old shoes, cracking at the toe, which he’d noticed weeks ago, and the money she’d been putting away for her far-off dream.
The corner of the sitting-room ceiling that had needed fixing since last winter, though he never seemed to find the time.
He pictured her alone in the house.
She’d manage, she always had, only there’d be no one to help with the heavy jobs, or to tell her to eat when she got absorbed in something and forgot.
Was it the right thing?
He couldn’t say, and he wasn’t sure it even counted as a decision.
He just couldn’t stand the idea of walking off and leaving everything like this without doing something.
The paper.
Burning it wouldn’t change much, he knew that.
The original would stay in the Archive on the same shelves he’d arranged himself hundreds of times, and those were out of his reach now.
But the copy that would come to him in a few days would be in his own hands, and that one he could do something about.
He had no plan past that.
If the paper wasn’t on him when they came asking, he’d get a little time, and he had no idea what he’d do with it.
The personal copy came four days later.
A courthouse clerk dropped it on his table at the Archive door and left without asking for a signature, in a hurry, like a man with a job he wanted done with.
Oren folded it into his inner pocket and worked to the end of his shift as normal, one more paper among the dozens that went through his hands every week.
That night he waited until Marin was asleep and went out in his heavy coat, the paper still inside it.
He walked away from the houses toward the old storehouse at the edge of the village, the one nobody used since they’d built the new one near the market.
A dog was barking somewhere down the road, then stopped.
There was no light at the storehouse except the stars, and it was cold enough that he felt it right through the coat.
He sat on a big stone behind the building, well off any path, and took the paper out and unfolded it.
It was too dark to read but he knew it by heart, he’d looked at it so many times these past days, his name and the date.
He held it for close to a minute.
The stone was cold under him and the paper weighed next to nothing.
He struck a match he’d brought and put the flame to the corner.
It caught slowly, then quickly, and the fire lit his face and let it go again.
Nobody came, nothing made a noise, it was only a young man behind an old storehouse watching a page burn.
When it got close to his fingers he dropped what was left on the ground and let it finish there, and the wind carried the ash off between the stones.
He wiped his hands, went home, and got into his room without waking anybody.
In the morning he got up at his usual time and went to work.
He didn’t feel any different, and nobody in the street looked at him twice.
He’d done something that couldn’t be taken back, that was about all he knew, and he couldn’t have said if it was enough or if it counted for anything.
He worked, talked with Marin about nothing much, ate lunch when he always did and went home when it was time.
A few days later the supervisor had him sorting decades-old records and checking them against new lists the courthouse wanted, without saying why.
It was tedious work, names and birth dates and record numbers, until one name stopped him.
It showed up in two records spelled two ways, one with an extra letter on the end and one a letter short, though everything else matched, birth date, house number, father’s name.
Same person, no question.
He showed it to an older clerk who’d been in the section forever and asked whether it needed an official correction.
The man shrugged and didn’t look up.
“You get that a lot in the old records.
Names got written any way at all before they standardized the spelling.
Don’t bother.
Copy the newer form and leave the old one alone.” Oren wasn’t convinced.
The answer seemed too easy for whatever had caught his eye, though he couldn’t have said what that was, and he had no real reason to push it.
He filed both records the way he’d been told and picked up the next batch.
That evening Marin was sitting in the corner of the sitting room knitting something in thick wool, and she shoved it half under a piece of cloth when he came in.
“What’s that?” “Nothing to do with you yet.” “It looks heavy.” “It’s nearly winter and you go out without enough on.
I’ve seen you, shivering and acting like you’re not.” “I don’t.” “You do.” She went back to it.
“It won’t be done for weeks anyway, so don’t rush me.” He sat near her, took out the new notebook and wrote his usual two lines about the day.
The needles clicked away, and the lamp put a yellow circle over the two of them and not much beyond.
After a while, without looking up from the wool, she said, “Are you going to be here over the next months?” His pen stopped.
“Why?” “No reason.
Just asking.” A shrug.
“Everyone’s saying things are coming, and the Archive’s busier, like you said.
And the war’s closer than it’s ever been.” He took a moment.
“I don’t know yet what’s going to happen.
I’m here now.” She looked at him a bit longer than he liked, then nodded and went on knitting.
It wasn’t a lie, and it wasn’t all of it either.
He’d been living somewhere between the two lately, and the one thing he was sure of was that so far he was still here.
Across the village, on a shelf in the Archive, the record still had his name in it, and the date next to it CREATORS’ THOUGHTS Mister_0 “If you enjoyed this chapter, please consider leaving a few Power Stones and adding the book to your Library!
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