Chief Ingrid Halvorsen (Human, Survey Corps)

Halvorsen handed over the bench in the order it had come apart, which was the order it had gone together backwards, and the floor took it in the order the floor took things, which was not that.

She had never asked to go in. Five times she had brought three sealed sources home through a fold and walked them to this door and given them to a Safety Corps officer who did not know her and did not need to, and five times she had gone and sat on the bench in the corridor, which had been put there for people waiting for something and had, she suspected, been put there for her, since nobody else used it. The audit was the floor's. A Survey Chief who sat on the audit of her own bench had not audited anything. She had watched her own work being agreed with, which the floor could do without her, and did better.

The Chief Ranger had written the custody line's last entry standing, and initialled under it, and had watched the Senior sign, and had then stood in the corridor for about as long as it takes a fold window to be stated, and had gone. Not to the floor's door, where she had no standing. Out. Halvorsen had watched the going the way she watched a drift figure, not for the number but for whether it would stop, and it had not stopped, and had not hurried either. Five commanding officers had brought a department to this door in Halvorsen's time, and every one of them had asked to see the floor, as a courtesy to the Survey, and had been told, as a courtesy, that the floor did not take visitors during an audit, and had waited in the corridor anyway through the first day, because a thing one has carried a long way is hard to leave at a door. This one had not asked. This one had sat on a crate at the shelter's cold end for most of an hour with a source in her ears, and had asked what three sources sounded like braided, and had nodded at the answer, and had now walked away from the one room in the record where the answer would be made, without asking when.

Halvorsen noted it, and did not know what column it went in.

She sat on the bench. The floor would take what it took. Inside, three sealed things that had done their one thing honestly on both sides of a fold were being asked whether the fold had changed them, which it had not, six times, and she had no reading on the seventh, because a reading was what the floor was for. What she had was what she had brought home six times now and handed to nobody: not a value, not cargo, a question with no desk. It had got no shorter on the hull. She had not said it to the Chief Ranger on the membrane, and had noticed the Chief Ranger not asking it, and had not said it to her at the door either, and there was nobody at this door whose question it was.

So she held it where she held it, and the clock over the floor's door kept the floor's time, which had never been anywhere.