By morning Soren still didn't have a face for the fourth delegate, and the missing face sat under everything else he did, a tooth he kept touching with his tongue.
He was reading the classification-review posting outside the committee wing when the woman stopped next to him and read it too.
Same posting. Same track.
"Bearer review," she said, not to him, to the board. "They put us on the same one."
Soren looked at her.
She was older than the students, not by much, and she wore the gray of no department he could name. Her left hand was gloved and the right one wasn't.
"Celia Ashcroft," she said. "You're the Class Z bearer everyone's writing reports about. I'm the one they already finished writing reports about."
◆◆◆◆
She walked with him because the review track put them in the same corridor twice a week and there was no polite way to peel her off, and Soren had learned this winter that the people who attached themselves for a reason were more useful watched than avoided.
