The fourth convoy formed in the assembly yard at the thirty-fifth hour, twenty-three residents booked out under the Ivory notice. That put a hundred and ninety-nine of the district's residents through the eastern post, which Luna Marr published as a column of figures with nothing written beside it.
Yenna Rook had kept the departure register from the first name onward, one line a person, with the hour each of them asked. She wrote every line in her own hand, on the argument that a count nobody signs turns into a rumour by the afternoon.
A convoy is a document with legs, so anybody who has watched four of them leave can write the fifth.
Regina Vance priced the departures at the twenty-eighth hour, since a strategist who cannot price a loss will call it treachery instead. Two hundred people gone is a quarter of the water draw, a quarter of the labour, plus the entire purpose of the guild notice.
