The child's name was Skarra, and she was seven years old, and she was standing in the market district's eastern corridor with her nose two inches from a merchant's pricing board, her lips moving in the specific configuration that silent reading produced when the reader's literacy was new enough that the reading's mechanics still required the mouth's participation.
Khao'khen watched her from across the corridor.
That morning followed the water system's first section's completion, and the city's ordinary business had resumed around the achievement indifferently, as it always resumed around achievements once their product became infrastructure. The function was now the condition that commerce depended upon, and dependence made invisible what fear of its absence had once made vivid.
