The Ring 5 breakthrough kept Hajin drained for three full days, yet it never once took his consciousness. Vella called it the cruelest honest design she had treated, since power had arrived without a single courtesy for the body paying for it.
He refused the cot officials kept moving into the council annex. Every dawn he sat up for the ward count, wrapped in a borrowed blanket, listening to clerks call damaged districts by name.
'Drained is not gone, and every name read aloud is still a person somebody has to answer for.'
The first dawn counted forty occupied ward bodies still breathing. The second dawn produced arguments between two district clerks over a double-listed street, and Hajin settled it while Vella changed the dressing on his arm.
