Fourteen names on the morning roll.
Tevra read them in her head the way she'd read them every morning for eleven months — not alphabetically, not by assignment, but in the order they woke up, because the order people woke up told you more about them than their work assignments did.
Garren was always first. The Orc rose at fourth bell without sound — no stretch, no groan, just a transition from horizontal to vertical that had the efficiency of someone who'd been waking before dawn for forty-four years and had stopped noticing the effort thirty years ago. He checked his boots (left, then right, always), checked his tamping iron (balance, grip, edge wear), and went outside. By the time the rest of the camp stirred, he'd already walked the day's section in the dark and come back and said nothing about it.
