Chapter 11: The Hearing

Brand read the banner twice.

Then he put the screen face down on the stove.

"On sight," he said. "So the next collar who sees me shoots."

"No," I said.

"Ember, it's a Registry order."

"It's a Registry order with a hole in it. A bonded wife can appeal her husband's cull."

"In person, at the Gate, in front of witnesses. It's the same rulebook Perrin read me at midnight."

Sable looked up. "And during a hearing?"

"No blood in the Gate yard while it sits. Gate law. Older than the Registry."

Brand looked at me for a long moment.

"You want me to walk into the Gate," he said. "With a cull order on my head."

"I want you to walk in beside me. And I want your sister to steal something first."

Sable grinned slowly. "What am I stealing?"

"The tower feed. The raw one. Before they wipe it."

She was already out the door.

The hearing sat two days later, at noon, in the Gate yard.

They put a table on the loading dock under the Gate clock.

Ottoline Hawthorne sat behind it in her ivory coat, with her Registry seal ring on her hand and a screen in front of her.

Perrin stood behind her chair.

Two dozen collars lined the walls.

But the yard was full of other people too.

Traders. Drivers. Haven guards off shift. Wasteland crews down from three towns.

Half of them had been at the fence that dawn.

Brand stood beside me on the painted line, in his leather jacket, with his hands empty.

Every collar in the yard was watching him.

He didn't look at any of them.

Ottoline didn't stand.

"The animal attacked a Registry patrol," she said. "We have the footage. The bond suspension is revoked. This is a formality, Miss Faraday."

"Mrs. Tarrant," I said.

A few traders snorted.

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