Saul tapped the new page once with the side of his pen.
"Next thing," he said. "Tom."
Tom Evans straightened off the bench at the south wall the way men straightened when their turn had been coming for a while and they had been keeping the words in order against the wait. He had been Oscar's right hand back when there had been an Oscar to be right hand to, and the loss of the man had moved into Tom's shoulders the way a long grief moved into a man — quiet, structural, the kind a body learned to walk under without making a production of the walking. He set his cup down on the bench behind him and came to the table.
Edna's eye tracked him for a half-second longer than it tracked the others. He did not see it. Lenny saw it from the wall. Lenny's hands did not move.
"The fuel," Tom said. He did not sit. He stood at the foot of the table with both hands resting flat on the back of the empty chair in front of him. "I will give it to you the way it is. Then I will tell you what we need."
Saul set the pen down.
"We are running on borrowed time on the jets," Tom said. "Roberts's pilots have been flying on the strategic reserves Adams's people left in the southern hangars when the line cut. The reserves were larger than we hoped and smaller than we needed. They are not larger than we hoped anymore. The choppers go through the reserves faster than the jets do because we use them more. The ground convoys go through the reserves faster than the choppers do because we use them more than that. The math has been running one direction since Roberts and I started running it together, and the direction is the direction you already know it is."
Daniel had gone very still down the table. Roberts had not moved at all.
"The wells are in our hand." Tom kept his voice level. "Oklahoma. Amarillo. The Dallas field. The Houston rigs and the Corpus Christi spread. Some of them never went down — they had their own generation on site and the crews kept them running through everything. Some of them came back up after our people walked in. The infrastructure is there. The crude is there. The pipe is there in most of the runs. Where the pipe is gone we have routes for the trucks."
He drew a breath.
"The refineries are the problem. We have four standing at the levels we need them. Two of them we are running undermanned. One of them we are running at a fraction of what it could put out. The fourth we cannot bring up at all without heavy equipment we do not have hands to move. Cracking towers. Heat exchangers. The pumps that have to come out and be rebuilt before the line will run. The kind of work that takes a hundred men and a real crane and a stretch of weeks. We do not have a hundred men. The crane we have is the crane the corridor lent us out of Mount Morris that they recovered from Rochester a few years ago. The stretch of weeks we have is the stretch of weeks between one shortage and the next."
Mike's jaw was tight from where he was sitting. He had been the one who sent the crane south. He had known when he sent it that it was one crane against a continent of refineries.
"And the grid." Tom let the word sit. "Whatever Adams's people did at the start, whatever AN's piece set running the night the war turned — the old grid is gone. Not damaged. Gone. The transformers across the southern half of the country went together at the same minute. We have not put a single one of them back up. Nothing we have built since runs on the grid. Everything we have built since runs on the panels."
"The panels are running everything from the bunkhouses to the kilns to the pumps at the wells." Mike took it up from his seat. "I have crews on the panels at every node from Geneseo to Corpus. Every roof. Every south-facing wall. Where we are running, we are running on sun. Where we are not running, we are not running because we have not put enough panel up yet."
"The refineries are the place where the sun is not enough." Tom set his palms flat to the chairback. "A cracking tower at full pull wants the kind of power a city used to draw. A refinery at full pull wants the kind of power a county used to draw. We do not have a county's worth of panel and we are not going to have a county's worth of panel by the season. Even at the levels we are running the southern refineries on now, we have the panel arrays running at the edge of what they can give. If we scale up — and we have to scale up — we are going to need a power solution that is not the sun, and we are going to need it before we put the next refinery into the pull."
Shane turned the thermos a quarter turn. He did not speak yet.
"That is the engineering problem." Tom's voice came down a notch. "There is another problem. I am going to lay it out because the table needs it."
The room came back to him.
"The crews have been hit." Tom kept his hands flat. "Not the way Mikhail's people hit. Not the way Jesper's people used to hit. Different. The hits have been at the southern wells and at the line between the Dallas field and the Houston rigs. They come at night. They come at the change of the shift. They come at the kind of hour men coming off a shift are tired. They take fuel. They take equipment. They take men sometimes — not many, two or three at a hit. They do not stay. They do not press. They hit and they leave and the trail goes cold inside a few miles because they are using vehicles we have not been able to put a name on and routes the southern map does not have on it."
"Davis." Roberts said the word once, low, and let it stand.
"We have not put a face on Davis's people," Tom said. "We have not put a unit patch on what is left behind. We have not had a body. We have heard things in interrogation that point at Davis. We have seen vehicles at distance that fit the kind of vehicle Davis's people would have at their hand. We have not pinned it. We have the shape and we do not have the certainty. I am telling the table I think it is Davis because I do think it is Davis. I am telling the table I cannot prove it because I cannot prove it. The shape and the certainty are different and we have to hold them apart."
Roberts nodded once. Did not speak.
"Jesper is doing the other thing," Tom said. "He used to be a sledgehammer. He is not a sledgehammer anymore. He sits at the edge of our maps and he does not press and he does not leave. His people are seen at the same crossroads month after month. They are not buying. They are not selling. They are not raiding. They are watching. And then they are not at the crossroads anymore. And then they are at a different crossroads. He is being patient. He has learned to be patient. The patience is its own kind of pressure. The crews feel him out there even when he is not in front of them. The men sleep different than they used to sleep because he is out there."
Tom did not soften it. He did not need to. The room had taken the weight.
Shane let it sit a beat. Then he set both palms flat to the table.
"The power solution we will build." Shane's voice came easy. "The panel pull is at its edge. The refineries need what they need. I will sit with you after the meeting and we will start the picture of it. There are ways the Grimoire has for storing the sun's pull in things that are not panels and giving it back at the rate a cracking tower wants. We will not solve it today. We will start it today."
Tom's shoulders came down a quarter inch.
"The men we will not solve today either," Shane said. "We just froze the new lines. We will not unfreeze them for the refineries. The hands you have are the hands you have through this season. We will move what hands we can from the nodes that can spare them — Mike's framing crews are not all turning all season and the lighter framing months we can pull a rotation south. It will not be a hundred men. It will be something."
"It will be something," Tom said. "Something is more than what we have now."
"The hits," Shane continued. "The dogs come to the wells the same way they are going to come to Roberts's installations. The same gift. The same hide. The dog at the gate of every southern well by the end of the season. If it is Davis the dogs will read it before the men do. If it is somebody else the dogs will read that too. We close the gap at the wells the way we are closing it at the installations."
Tom nodded once. He let his hands come off the chair. The grief in his shoulders had not moved. The grief in his shoulders never moved. The set of him under the grief had loosened a fraction.
"All right," Tom said. "All right." He sat down.
Lenny's eye moved across him from the wall, slow and soft. Edna's eye held him a half-second longer than it held the others. Tom did not see either of them.
Saul made his notations. He turned the page.
"Crops," Saul said.
Bump from Geneseo stood up from his bench. He was a long man with the easy bend at the shoulders of someone who had spent the last several years among growing things and had taken on a little of their patience.
"Geneseo is in." Bump did not draw it out. "Wheat in the bin. Oats in the bin. Corn in the bin. Squash and beans coming in through the next stretch. The orchards came through. The Idunn line is in everything the orchards put out and the apples came down off the limbs the size they came down at last year and the year before. Freyr's blessing on the soil is still running. The corn is taller than corn used to be and the ear is heavier than the ear used to be. Tonnage is up from the last harvest by a good margin."
"Same picture at Fillmore." Cross took it up from the south bench without standing. "Grain in. Beans in. The dairy is up. The cattle are calving heavier than they were calving before Shane walked the back pastures. The cheese cellar is full. The smokehouse is full."
"Ossian." Brent did not stand either. He had been at the wall through the meeting with a coffee that had gone cold a long while back. "The Morgan line." His mouth tugged at one corner — the only thing close to a smile the meeting had seen out of him. "I will get to the Morgans last. The grain is in. The hay is in. The hay is in heavier than the hay was in last year and the year before and that is the third year running. Whatever Freyr's hand put on the soil the corridor is still riding. We have not had a thin hay year since."
"Dansville." Lance, from the east bench. "In. The orchards in. The small grains in. The cidery is at full pull through the winter. We have not had a bad apple come off the limb in years."
"Naples." Lou — short, broad, the kind of man who had been a vintner before there had been a Sanctuary to be a vintner inside. "In. Grapes in. The new vineyards Mike and Bochica's people put in along the southern hills came through. We have wine at every node now. The grapes carried the Freyr line the way every other crop has carried it. The fruit came in at sizes I had not seen on a vine before I came to the corridor."
The reports came one after the other, the way operational reports came at the end of a long meeting — efficient, quiet, the rhythm of men who knew their own ground and were not going to dress it up for the table.
Saul made the notations beside each name.
"And the tonnage." Saul did not look up from the page. "Total. Against the population we are feeding."
Bump answered. He had known the question was coming.
"At max." Bump's voice came even. "We are at max. The harvest is in. The harvest is bigger than last year. The harvest is being eaten faster than last year. Plains is the reason. Daniel and Raymond's numbers came up at every node along the convoy line and the convoy line answered. The wheat that used to sit in the bin through the winter is on a wagon going west by the end of the month it came off the field. We are feeding the corridor. We are feeding the plains. We are feeding what came over from Bochica's road and what came up from Yúcahu's. We have the food for it. We do not have a surplus on it."
"No cushion," Cross said from the south bench.
"No cushion," Bump said.
The room let that sit.
"A bad season," Lance said. "One bad season and the cushion that is not there is the cushion we are going to wish was there."
"We are not going to have a bad season." Shane's voice came easy. "Freyr's blessing is in the soil. Idunn's line is in the orchards. The corridor's ceremonies are feeding the spirits that are feeding the ground. The ground is not going to fail us this season. I have read it on the Loom and I will read it again before the planting comes round. We are not going to have a bad season."
"This season." Daniel said it without heat. "What about the one after."
"The one after we will read when we are reading the one after." Shane held Daniel's eye. "I am not going to speak on things that don't need saying yet. We will hold what we have."
Daniel nodded once and let it lie.
"Morgans." Saul turned to Brent.
Brent's mouth came up at the corner again.
"The Morgans are something else," Brent said. "I will tell you about them. The lines came down the way Shane set them up — the gestation came in fast, the foals came out clean, the dams came back to condition inside a stretch that the dams used to take the better part of a year to come back inside. The line is putting out three foals for every one the old line would have put out across the same span of time. The herd is fat. The herd is at strength. The herd is bigger than the herd used to be by a margin I would not have believed if I had not been the man counting the head."
He paused.
"That is not the part I came to say."
The room came to him.
"The newest generation." Brent let it out the way a man let out a thing he had been keeping in his mouth a while because he had wanted to say it correctly the first time. "The ones born after the magic in the corridor had been running for as long as it had been running. The ones born to mothers that were grazing on Shane's grass and drinking out of the springs Shane walked. They are different. I am not going to pretend they are not different. The colts come up on their feet inside the first hour the way the colts always have. The colts know things the colts should not know that fast. A colt at the eastern barn went around the new fence line at a week old the way a colt would go around a fence line at six months. The mares are reading the riders before the riders are reading the mares. One of the yearlings at the south barn walked into the smithy when the smith was about to come down on a piece of work and put its nose at the smith's elbow and the smith stopped and the piece of work that was about to come down wrong came down right the next stroke. The smith told me about it that night. The smith is not a man who tells stories. The yearling went back to the south barn after the stroke landed."
Brent let it sit.
"They are not the working dogs," Brent said. "It is not the same gift. It is its own thing. The line is becoming its own thing. I do not have a name for it. I am telling the table because the table needs to know. The corridor is breeding something into the Morgans that the corridor did not breed in on purpose."
Shane looked at him a long second. The hum in his chest had not gone away since the children. It went up a quarter register and settled there.
"Keep them," Shane said. "Keep watching them. Tell us the next thing you see. We will read it when we read it."
"That was what I was going to do," Brent said. He sat back.
Saul made the last notation. He did not turn the page this time.
He set the pen down flat against the ledger.
The afternoon light through the eastern window had moved another hand's width along the floor. The brisket smell was at the thick point it came to before the kitchens called the room down to eat. The dogs in the inner wall had gone quiet. Outside, somewhere along the south fields, a wagon came down off the gravel onto the packed dirt with the soft change of sound a wagon made when it left one ground for another.
Saul looked up at the room, made the small downward motion with one hand that meant the table was closed, and the meeting hall came apart into the easy noise of a room full of people who had been sitting still too long. Benches scraped. Cups got gathered. Somebody laughed at the south wall at something somebody else had said too low to carry. The brisket smell pulled half the room toward the door before the other half had stood up.
Edna got up from Saul's side and Jason came across from where he had been at the wall through the meeting to meet her. He put his hand at the small of her back, brief, the way he did, and the two of them angled together through the loosening room toward Jack and Cross, who had stood up from the Fillmore bench and were waiting for them with the patience of men who had known Edna since she was a young girl.
"There she is," Jack said. He took her hand in both of his. His hands were a farmer's hands, broad and dry and warm. "We were going to come find you if you didn't come find us."
"You sat through that whole meeting just to say hello to me," Edna said.
"We sat through that whole meeting because Saul makes us." Cross had Edna's other hand for a second, then clasped Jason's. "Jason. Good to see you holding up under her."
"Somebody has to," Jason said.
Jack and Cross both knew the joke for what it was and let it land easy. The four of them stood in the eddy of the emptying room, a little pocket of the kind of ease that came from people who went back further than the war and further than the Shroud and further than any of it.
"How are the little ones," Jack said. He asked it the way the old ones asked it — the real question, not the polite one. "Yours, I mean. Eric and Leanne. We hear things on the convoy. We don't know what to make of the things we hear."
Edna's face did the thing it did when the children came up. The whole hard competence she carried for the rest of the day went soft at the edges.
"They're well," she said. "Growing too fast. Eric holds his fork the exact way Jason holds his fork and will not be talked out of it, and Leanne has decided she runs the family quarters and most days she's right." She paused, and then, because it was Jack and because it was Cross, she gave them the real answer too. "And they are — more than that. You've heard right, whatever you heard. It's real."
"How real," Cross said.
Edna glanced at Jason. Jason gave the smallest tip of his head — go ahead, they're family.
"Leanne pulls the life out of the air around her when she wants to," Edna said. Her voice stayed even and warm. "Not the way you'd think. She pulls the motion clean out of it. A thing coming at her stops in the air. Stops cold — the cold is part of it, the whole room goes cold inside the ring of it. A swing stops mid-swing. The first time it happened at the kitchen I thought the world had stopped. The world hadn't stopped. Just everything inside the circle she'd drawn around herself."
Jack's mouth had come open a small amount. He had not noticed it come open.
"And Eric's the other side of the same coin," Edna went on. "He puts up a field that goes thick and mean for anybody who means harm — and the harder they fight to get through it, the more of their own strength it feeds straight into him. He gets stronger the longer they push. A boy from one of the outer settlements grabbed at a sweet roll in Eric's hand last fall and wore himself out trying to get to it while Eric stood there eating it. I had to go over and tell Eric to let the poor boy go."
Cross set his cup down on the bench without drinking from it.
"Edna," Jack said. Quiet. Not an oath. The plain version of the words. "Edna. Those are your babies. We watched you carry trays at the Hemlock with Martin on your hip. Now you're telling me—"
"I'm telling you," Edna said.
Jack looked at Cross. Cross looked at Jack. The two of them had between them the specific stillness of men who had come to a table expecting to hear about somebody's grandkids and had been handed something they did not have a box to put down inside.
"We knew it was something," Cross said finally. He turned his cup in his hand. "The convoy talk made it sound like — I don't know what it made it sound like. Not that. Not your two."
"Nobody knows what to make of it the first time they hear the whole of it," Edna said. "We didn't, either. We've had longer to sit with it than you have."
Jack was quiet a moment. When he came back he came back gently, the way a man stepped onto ground he was not sure would hold.
"And Martin," Jack said. How's a young man like that handling it — the little ones coming up the way they're coming up, everything he must be seeing."
Edna held the question a second. There was a great deal under it that Jack did not know was under it — Modi under Martin, the protocols laid in to keep the man a man, the dog Copper at his side dampening a storm Martin did not know he carried. None of it was Jack's to hold. None of it was Cross's. They were good men, and they were family, and they were entirely, blessedly outside the whole of it, and Edna would have carried the war on her own back the rest of her life before she set one ounce of that weight down onto two men from Fillmore who loved her.
So she gave them the true thing that was also the only thing they needed.
"Thankfully," Edna said, and she smiled, "he's still Martin."
Jack and Cross both eased at that. It was a thing they could hold. A young man who was still himself in spite of everything around him changing.
"Good," Cross said. "That's good. That's the main thing, isn't it. That he's still himself."
"That's the main thing," Edna said.
"You bring them down to Fillmore," Jack said. He had her hand again. "All of them. Martin, Eric, Leanne, Jason, the whole crew. The Hemlock's still standing — your kitchen's still your kitchen, far as I'm concerned, I just mind it for you. The cheese cellar's full and the smokehouse is full and the children can run the back pastures. There's nothing down there that'll trouble them."
"We will," Edna said. "I promise we will. The moment the front out west goes quiet long enough that I trust the road, we'll come."
"That's all we ask," Jack said. "The moment it goes quiet."
"The moment it goes quiet," Edna said, and she meant it, and all three of them knew the road might be a while in going quiet, and none of them said so, because some promises were the kind you made true by intending them hard enough until the world made room.
Across the room, Lenny had peeled off the wall and come down to where Tom Evans was gathering his cup off the bench behind him. Lenny moved through a crowded room the way Lenny moved through everything — too big to miss and somehow arriving beside you before you had clocked him crossing the distance, the broad slab of him carried on feet that were lighter than a man that size had any business owning.
"Tom Evans," Lenny said. He said the whole name. He had a way of saying a man's whole name that made the man feel briefly like the only entry in a very important ledger.
"Lenny." Tom straightened. There was the start of something wary in it — Tom knew when he was being checked on, and Tom had been checked on a fair amount through the hard stretch.
"I'm not gonna do a thing," Lenny said, holding both enormous hands up, palms out, the picture of a man swearing off all mischief. "I'm not gonna ask you how you're sleeping. I'm not gonna ask you if you're eating your vegetables. I'm not your mother. Although —" he tilted his head, considering Tom with one eye half-shut "— I would make a tremendous mother. Tragic, really, for the world, that I am not."
Tom's mouth moved. It was not quite a smile. It was the suburb of a smile. It was further than Tom's mouth had gone in some time.
"I'm doing better," Tom said. "Since you're going to ask anyway."
"I wasn't going to ask," Lenny said. "But since you brought it up. Better how."
Tom turned the cup in his hand. "Not drinking. A while now. A good while." He said it plainly, the way a man said a true thing he had earned and did not want to dress up and did not want to diminish. "Some nights are still some nights. But I'm not — I'm not down in it the way I was down in it. I climbed out. I'm staying out."
Lenny went still in a way Lenny rarely went still. For one second the whole cartoon of him dropped away and there was just the size of him and the steadiness underneath the size, the part of him that read a room before the rest of him performed in it.
"That's the hardest climb there is," Lenny said quietly. "And you did it without a rope. I see you, Tom. I want you to hear me say I see it."
Tom's throat moved. He nodded.
"There's a thing," Tom said, after a second, like he wanted to give Lenny something back for the seeing. "Oscar's people. His hometown. Boise City, down in the Oklahoma panhandle. They sent word up the convoy line. They built a meeting center. New one, big one, the place the whole town runs out of now." He stopped, started again. "They named it for him. The Reyes Center. After Oscar. So he's — he's on the front of a building down there now, where everybody who ever knew him walks past his name every day."
Lenny let that settle between them, and for once he did not rush in to fill it.
"Reyes Center," Lenny said. He nodded slow. "Good. That's right. A man like that ought to be a place people gather. That's exactly what he was, wasn't it. The place people gathered." He put one of his enormous hands on Tom's shoulder, and the hand was gentle in a way the size of it made surprising. "You know what I think, Tom? I think grief is just love that's got nowhere to go for a while. It's love stuck in the driveway with the engine running. And then one day it figures out where to go. Yours just figured out where to go. It's going to Boise City. It's going to a building with his name on the front. That's not a small thing you did, carrying it that far without setting it down in a bottle. That's about the biggest thing a person does."
Tom looked at the floor a second. When he looked up his eyes were bright and his jaw was set against the bright.
"Thanks, Lenny."
"Anytime." Lenny took his hand off the shoulder and the cartoon came back up over the steadiness, the way the curtain came down over a stage. "Also you look terrible and you should eat about four of whatever Edna's been threatening violence over, immediately, before Big Ed gets to it, because Big Ed eats like the brisket personally wronged him."
The suburb of a smile finally made it the rest of the way into town. Tom huffed something that was nearly a laugh and went to get his food.
By the head table, Johnny John had not moved toward the door with the rest of them. He had drifted instead to where Saul was closing the ledger, and he stood at Saul's elbow with the quiet of a man who had timed his approach for the moment the room's noise would cover a conversation that did not need an audience.
"Four slots," Johnny John said. Soft. "You're filling them today."
"Today," Saul said. He squared the ledger's edge against the table. "After we eat. Lenny, Chad, Randy, Butch. Shane lays the hook and gives them what the read tells him to give."
Johnny John was quiet a moment. When he spoke his voice came careful, the way a man's voice came careful when he was about to tell another man a true thing the man might not want.
"I want you to hear something before you do it," Johnny John said. "Not to stop you. To get it set in you before the room fills back up and the moment passes and nobody ever says it out loud."
Saul set the ledger down and gave him the room.
"You are at the top of it," Johnny John said. "What you carry. The slots, the skills, the reach of you. You are running higher than I have ever seen a mortal run. Higher than any of the ones I carried, back when I carried them — and I carried some that were not small." He let that sit. "I had men with the speed in them. I had men with the strength — the most a body can hold and still be a body. I had a man once carried a read on other men's hearts the way your links carry the Clarity. I never had one carry all of it at once the way you carry it. I never had one with the reach to put the read into another man and keep the line open the way you keep it. You are past where I ever ran one. You are past, I think, where a mortal was ever meant to run one."
Saul took it the way Saul took most things — without flinching from it and without inflating it. "You're telling me there's a ceiling."
"I'm telling you you may be standing on it," Johnny John said. "Filling these four is not the same as growing. These four are slots you were holding empty. You are filling the house you already built. I do not know that the house gets any bigger after this. The upgrades came when you had room to grow into. You may not have room to grow into after today. I want you to fill these four knowing it might be the last new thing the system ever does." He paused. "After these four, the only way a new slot opens is the way you do not want a new slot to open. A link would have to fall. That is the only door left, far as I can read it."
Saul was quiet a stretch. The room moved around them, warm and loud, and the two of them stood in the small still pocket of it.
"All right," Saul said finally. "All right. I'd rather know than not." He turned the ledger a quarter turn under his hand, a gesture so much like Shane's with the thermos that neither of them remarked on it. Then something moved behind his eyes, a question he had been carrying a while without a place to put it.
"The system," Saul said. "Does it fight age? Being a link. Does it hold a man against getting old."
Johnny John tipped his head. "It does. Not the way the stories want it to. It does not make you a young man forever and it does not stop the thing that stops everybody eventually. But it pushes the post back. A man who'd have gone at eighty might go at a hundred. The body holds its condition further into the run than a body holds it on its own. It is not nothing. It is not a miracle. It is years. Good years, mostly."
Saul's eyebrows went up a fraction and came back down as a thing fell into place.
"That explains Norm," Saul said.
Johnny John's mouth came up at one corner, the closest the man came to a laugh. "It explains Norm."
"I've been wondering about Norm for a while," Saul said. "Man should not move the way Norm moves."
"No," Johnny John agreed. "He should not." Then the half-smile went thoughtful, and he added the thing he was less sure of, the way an honest man flagged the edge of his own certainty. "There may be more to it than the slot, though. With your people. I can't read it clean, so take it as a maybe and not a knowing." He glanced across the room to where Shane stood near the door with the thermos in his hand and Vigor at his heel. "Shane's magic has been running through this corridor a long time. Through the soil and the water and the grass and the animals and the air the whole compound breathes. The dogs are changing. The horses are changing. The children are coming in already carrying it. I do not think a man can stand in the middle of all that for years and have none of it settle into him." He shrugged, a small honest motion. "I can't prove it. I won't say it like I can. But I'd not be surprised, in the end, if your people run longer than even the slot accounts for. Something's in the ground here. Some of it's bound to be in the people too."
Saul looked across at Shane a moment, and then back at the four names in the ledger — Lenny, Chad, Randy, Butch — and he was quiet with it.
"Last new thing the system ever does," Saul said, half to himself.
"Maybe," Johnny John said. "Maybe not. But fill them like it's a thing that matters, in case it's the last time it does." He clasped Saul once on the shoulder, brief, and let his hand fall. "Now go eat. Shane won't lay the hook on an empty room and a cold table, and Edna really will commit violence."
Saul huffed a short breath through his nose, picked the ledger up off the table, and tucked it under his arm. The two of them turned toward the door, where the brisket smell was thick now and the first of the room was already spilling out into the long afternoon light toward the meal, and the four names rode in the ledger under Saul's arm toward the thing that came next.