Uriel carried the deployment scroll to the registry table, and Hajin dragged a chair beside the map for her feet. Wrappings showed beneath her socks, and the borrowed civilian tunic no longer carried the Flint crest from her old collar.
"Sit, before you bleed all over my nice floor."
"It's a stone floor, and I can stand through one council," she muttered, though she sat anyway.
"Uh-huh, tell that to the red trail you left at the gate."
She unrolled the paper until her father's seal sat beneath the command lamp, and Hans leaned in to read.
"Northern Pacification Army," she read, tapping the formal heading above the approach routes, "he wrote these movements three weeks before they crossed into our valley."
"Three weeks?" Hajin barked, nearly knocking the lamp over, "and nobody thought to send us a polite note?"
Hans checked the unit marks while Taren unfolded the copied supply register beside them.
