Twelve names on the roll.
Tevra stood at the front of the platform in the clothes she'd washed the night before. They were her only set that didn't smell of tamping-iron residue and ballast dust, the ones she saved for the occasions that required looking like a person rather than a component of the railway. Her right hand's callus had cracked in the cold and been patched with beeswax and linen by Miri, whose hands had the same problem and whose solution was better than Tevra's, which had been to ignore it until it bled.
Twelve of fourteen. The passes had been distributed three days ago. They were the inaugural run crew acknowledgment, printed on the same letterstock that the Mechanist Academy used for formal publications, which was the Dominion's way of saying you matter in a vocabulary that used paper weight instead of words.
The foreman read the names.
"Garren Stonecrop."
No voice answered.
