Current District

The Marked

Chapter 73: Current District

They walked East Ward with clipboards, coffee, and the kind of intent that makes every watching institution feel personally criticized.

Imani built the route from memory.

"Harbor first while first shift is leaving and second shift is still home. Mason before lunch. Reeve on the turn. If you want Canal today, you will need better shoes and a theology of wet basements."

Adira looked at Ren's boots.

"He has neither."

"I have paper," Ren said.

"That's been your defense for months."

"It's improving."

The morning count split by instinct.

Naomi and Imani took doors because nobody in East Ward would mistake either of them for neutral. Andrea and Joel took forms because forms had become part of their penance. Adira took the stairwells and hazard notes. Wray floated between map and street with the frayed composure of a woman trying to force parcel language to remain within moral sight of laundry lines.

Ren went where the count thickened.

Harbor answered first.

Mothers by doors. Night workers before sleep. A man in paint-splattered jeans who had been listed transferred to North County six months earlier and was currently carrying drywall over one shoulder while explaining that his mother's prescription still arrived at Sacred Heart because "every official place I give the real address to starts talking relocation at me."

Ren wrote:

CURRENT PRESENT / MOVEMENT DOES NOT CANCEL ADDRESS

The hallway at Harbor eleven felt different in daylight than it had the day before. Still heavy. Still officially thinned.

But now the district had a room to answer from, and that changed the drag by giving it something to pull against.

Marcus said through the speaker clipped to Tomas's bag:

"The east line hates witnesses."

"How can you tell."

"Because it gets flatter every time somebody names a person and deeper every time somebody says district."

That turned out to be true.

When Joel asked for "current household count," people answered with doors, cousins, mattresses, inhalers, school routes, and who still had keys. When a code officer passing on the sidewalk said "the district remains under phased habitability review," the whole block seemed to sink half an inch under the sentence.

Naomi caught it too, even without the Realm.

"Hear that," she said to Wray.

"I hear you being intolerable."

"No. The other thing. The way summary tries to make gravity out of itself."

Wray looked around the block. At windows. At the posted plywood. At the three children sharing one scooter and cursing with astonishing structural creativity.

"Yes," she said finally. "I hear it in posture."

Mason Court answered harder.

The buildings there were taller, meaner, and less willing to help strangers read them. Court B had a broken entry light and a stairwell repaired twice by people who had never once expected reimbursement. Court C had notices taped over older notices until the wall near the mailboxes looked like a civic compost heap.

PRESENT OCCUPANCY UNCONFIRMED
ENTRY UNSAFE
REVIEW PENDING

Below that, in marker:

THEN WHO KEEPS STEALING MY ELECTRIC

Naomi approved the theology of that immediately.

Lio Perez showed up halfway down the hall with a ring of little kids orbiting him at different speeds.

"Told you they'd come while people were out," he said.

"We came while people were in."

"Exactly."

He walked them door to door with the crisp impatience of a boy forced into logistics too young and therefore excellent at it.

Current: his mother in C-4, his aunt across the landing, Miss Janice in C-1 who had not slept elsewhere in eleven years and was still marked transitional in one county file, two brothers in B-2 whose lights came from extension cords run through a window because the interior meter had been listed inactive and the actual children had unfortunately continued.

Andrea stopped at that.

"Listed inactive."

Lio nodded.

"Meters, apartments, people. Depends who's visiting."

Joel wrote faster. Wray took the notice from the wall.

"This posting has no current inspector signature."

Lio shrugged.

"Yeah. They like the copy machine better than us."

Reeve answered through former names first and current names second.

Mrs. Bell led them there with her cane and her indignation. Three women came out of a laundromat when they saw her and immediately began correcting one another's memory in the public interest.

"She was in 4B, not 4D." "No, 4D before the leak, 4B after the leak." "Write both if you're writing anything truthful."

Imani did.

Current and former braided again.

By midday the East Ward board at Sacred Heart had outgrown one wall. Pilar arrived with extra butcher paper, a stapler, and the affronted air of a woman who had been told too late that an operation required proper archival behavior.

"Why am I learning about scale after breakfast."

"Because Providence hates project management," Naomi said.

Pilar stapled the second sheet up anyway.

CURRENT HARBOR
CURRENT MASON
CURRENT REEVE
FORMER / CURRENT ROUTES

She underlined CURRENT with enough force to qualify as civic percussion.

Wray brought in the updated parcel printout an hour later and laid it beside the wall count.

HARBOR ROW ACTIVE UNITS: 6
MASON COURT ACTIVE UNITS: 4
REEVE TOWERS ACTIVE UNITS: 3

Ren looked up at the wall.

Harbor alone had beaten that before ten. Mason had doubled it by noon. Reeve had answered from laundromats, church mail, cousins, and unofficial leases all morning.

He wrote the live count beside the official one.

HARBOR CURRENT: 17 HONEST
MASON CURRENT: 11 HONEST
REEVE CURRENT: 8 HONEST

The room held harder: friction rather than triumph, as if the district and the city had both reached for the same noun and discovered the other hand already on it.

Late in the afternoon, Reuben Clay came through the red door carrying a nailed board ripped from one of Harbor's outer walls.

He set it on the table with one grunt.

DISTRICT VACANCY CONFIRMATION / FRIDAY REVIEW WINDOW

Friday. No hour listed.

Naomi read it.

"Cowards."

Wray checked her watch.

"Today is Wednesday."

Joel looked at the board, then at the parcel printout, then at the current count wall with the slow horror of a man beginning to understand how a whole district gets vanished in language while every individual step still sounds administrative.

"They're timing it."

Andrea did not look surprised enough for comfort.

"Inspection windows. School hours. shift changes. shelter bus routes. They always said field availability."

Imani took the nailed board, leaned it against the wall under CURRENT MASON, and said:

"Fine. Then Friday they can inspect a district that has already named itself before witnesses."

Mrs. Bell sat down at the table with a cup of Miss Joanne's coffee and nodded like a magistrate blessing incompetence into usefulness.

"There," she said. "That's the first adult sentence of the day."

Ren copied the posting exactly into his notebook.

DISTRICT VACANCY CONFIRMATION
FRIDAY REVIEW WINDOW

Then beneath it:

CURRENT DISTRICT ANSWERS.

This time the answer did not come from one building or one room. It moved through Harbor, Mason, and Reeve together with the rough gathered pressure of something refusing summary on multiple blocks at once.

Marcus inhaled sharply over the speaker.

"Good," he said. "Bad for me. Good for the city."

Naomi took the speaker in hand.

"Try not to die because we're doing excellent paperwork."

"I make no promises."

Wray looked at the current counts, the parcel printout, the vacancy posting, and the room full of people now too publicly present to be called unverified without visible malice.

"Friday," she said. "Then let's make sure they inspect the living district instead of the one they've been scheduling around."