The buried transmitter drew its power off twelve linked cores under the floor, and all twelve were still attached to people. Luna worked that out at the head of the stair inside eleven seconds, then laid her pencil flat on the ledger.
A battery does not have to be dead to work, which is the part of the design nobody in Orison had thought to check. The Directorate had built a power supply out of hunters who went missing off a scanner lookup table.
Nine of the twelve names on that table were published in a relay house four months ago. Families have been waiting on them since, in the ordinary way that families wait, which is to say by keeping a room.
Yenna went down the stair with the log under one wrecked arm before anybody at the top had agreed a plan. She wrote the chamber dimensions, the hour, plus the figure twelve, then started asking the cases for their names.
