Orison's assessment lobby held two hundred people on the morning of the retest, which was two hundred more than it usually held. Grade assessments are administrative events, so the Association had never needed seating in a room built for queuing.
Vell recognized eleven faces from the market and four from the scrap belt beyond the wall. Two of the four had refused him work in a season when refusing him work was the safe civic choice.
Nobody in that lobby apologized to him, which he preferred to the alternative on offer. An apology delivered on a day like this one costs the speaker nothing while asking him to accept it publicly.
He had rehearsed answers for eleven months against a morning that never arrived in the shape he expected. What arrived instead was a room full of people who wanted to be able to say they had been present.
