Day twelve.
Wren wrote the number on the ledger standing up, because there were no chairs. There had been chairs on Day one: four of them, wooden, the kind the Physician Corps requisitioned from the furniture ministry in batches of twenty. By Day five, the chairs were in the overflow annex holding coats that nobody was coming back to collect. By Day eight, someone had moved the coats and the chairs were holding patients. By Day ten, two of the chairs had broken under a man who weighed less than he had a week ago, and Wren had dragged the pieces into the alley behind the treatment hall because they were taking up space that could hold a cot.
Day twelve. She wrote the total.
Four hundred and forty-eight.
Her handwriting was smaller than it had been on Day one due to accuracy, not exhaustion. The numbers needed to be legible in a column, and the column was running out of page. She'd started a second page on Day nine.
