Chapter 2: Not in Our System

Cold air and the smell of reheated fish pie met her at the door. The Edgewick Branch occupied the ground floor of a municipal building that had been designed, Morri suspected, by someone who believed natural light was a character flaw. The windows were narrow and set high, admitting thin rectangles of morning grey that fell across the floor in parallel strips, illuminating nothing useful. Thaumaturgic lamps mounted along the ceiling compensated with the flat, even glow that institutions preferred — bright enough to read by, too bright to feel comfortable in, the lighting equivalent of a firm handshake from someone you hadn't asked to touch you. She stood inside the entrance and let the door close behind her. The branch was already open, already occupied, already conducting the ordinary business of a Tuesday morning with the quiet efficiency that was Edgewick's defining characteristic. A clerk at the far desk was filing something into a cabinet, drawer open, drawer shut, open, shut, the rhythm of a person who had filed ten thousand things before this one and would file ten thousand more. Two patrons occupied the reading area near the windows, both absorbed in periodicals, both positioned to catch the thin morning light. A woman at the returns counter was signing something while a second clerk waited with the patient blankness of someone whose job required patience and offered nothing in return. Morri joined the queue. There was a queue. Of course there was a queue. Edgewick Branch ran on queues the way the Tangle ran on guild covenant — not because anyone had designed it that way, but because the alternative was chaos, and Edgewick did not tolerate chaos. The queue was three people deep: the woman at the counter, a man holding a stack of municipal records bound…