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The window on a crush was four hours, and Dait’s people had spent six of them deciding whether it was worth the fee. Su’inn knew this because they told her. They told her while they were carrying him in, all four of them talking at once, laying out the deliberation in detail, as though the reasoning had been sound and she would want to hear it. There had been a vote. Someone said the boy was only twenty-two. Someone knew a woman in Ellersgate who did the same work for a third of the fee. Someone else had said, and they repeated this twice, that these things often came right on their own. “They do,” Su’inn said. “Put him on the table.” Only one of them was not talking. He was older than the others and he had the same jaw as the boy they were carrying, and he had his hands under his brother’s shoulders and his eyes on the floor, and he had not said one word since the stairs. The mill hand was twenty-two and grey as a fish. His right arm ended in something that was still, technically, a hand. The sorting drum had taken it against the frame and held it there for the length of time it took four men to find the brake, which was longer than any of them would ever admit out loud. She got her left forearm across his shoulder and put her weight on it. That was the anchor. It had been her palm once. Now it was her forearm and most of her upper body, and it worked, and she had stopped noticing the difference around the same time she had stopped expecting anyone else to. “Ferrow.” “Here.” “His feet. He is going to buck.” “He always bucks,”…