the courtyard wall, where fire had charred the plaster. After the weeks of hunching over the documents, squatting on the floor of the dormitory, it felt good to throw myself into more physical work again. Although it left me with plaster dust in my hair, and hands grayed with dirt, it was a cleaner kind of work than grubbing through the papers of the long dead.
It was dark when I returned to the dormitory. Zoe and Simon had gone, and Piper was by the window, bundling together a small pile of papers to take with him. The Ringmaster was alone at the far end of the dormitory. He stood when I entered.
“I wanted to show you this, before I go,” he said.
He passed me a sheet that he had put aside. I scanned it briefly. It was one of the technical reports that I’d read already, and stacked alongside the others. Column after column of numbers, as meaningless to me as the diagrams.
“You missed something.” He pointed to the bottom half of the sheet, where the mildew was so thick that the paper wore a layer of fuzz. “There’s a handwritten bit. You can hardly make it out, but it’s there.”
I bridled. “Have you been waiting here, just to give me a hard time because I missed something? You’ve seen how many papers I’ve had to wade through.”
“I’m not trying to criticize you,” he said. “I thought you’d want to see this.”
I took the sheet from him and read the pale heading of the handwritten section: Disciplinary Hearings (Yr. 52, Sept. 10).
“I did read this,” I said. “There’s a few pages like that—it’s the list of their crimes and punishments. Like the record of hearings before a Councilman.”
Underneath the heading was a list of names, annotated.
Upcher, J.
Theft of supplies from mess hall. Convicted. Restricted rations, 6 months; relocated to Section D, where extended electrical curfew is in effect.
Hawker, R.
Using electricity in curfew hours. Convicted. Restricted rations, 3 months.
Anderson, H.
Manslaughter. Acquitted. Convicted of lesser charge: Excessive use of force. Transferred to unarmed duties, 6 months.
I looked up at him. “I told you—I read these already.”
He shook his head. “Look more closely.” He pointed to the margin and turned the page so that it was horizontal. Then I saw it, scrawled sideways in the margin, the faded ink hard to differentiate from the mildew. It was barely visible, and I had to hold the paper close to the lamp to make it out.
Given that any unauthorized departures pose a clear security threat to the entire Ark, Anderson’s actions were found to fall within his remit as security officer. However, he has been sanctioned for shooting to kill, without making any other attempt to subdue Heaton when he encountered H. attempting to enter the principal ventilation shaft. The disciplinary committee accepted that Anderson had verbally warned H., but it was found that . . .
The rest was illegible.
“Heaton never got out of the Ark,” the Ringmaster said, taking back the page. “We should’ve known they’d try to stop him. He knew the location; he knew how to get in and out. They must have been terrified that he’d unleash a torrent of survivors from Topside.”
“You sound like you agree with what they did. Killing him.”
“I never said that. But I can see what they were thinking.” He moved toward the door. “Anyway, I thought you’d want to see it.”
“I wish you hadn’t shown me,” I called after him.
He turned in the doorway. “Even if he’d made it out of the Ark alive—what do you think would have happened to him, on the surface? You’ve seen the reports. It was a wasteland. The survivors were barely clinging on. Heaton wouldn’t have survived up there. He was old, already. He’d have gotten sick, or starved. At least this way he probably had a quicker death. Their weapons would have been efficient.”
He discussed death so casually. It was simply part of his vocabulary, as everyday as patrols or weather.
“I know he probably wouldn’t have survived up here,” I said. “The thing is, he knew that, too. And he went anyway.” I was thinking of what Piper had said to me before the battle, when we thought we could not win. That’s hope, he’d said.
The Ringmaster shrugged. “You said it yourself: you wanted to know what happened to him.”
He reached a hand for my face. For an instant it rested against the side of my jaw. The last time he’d touched me, it had been to grab