Chapter 13: The Confinement of Sorra Dael

The requisition form arrived on Oreth's desk on the fourteenth of Coldmonth, four years and eleven days into the administration of the New Order of Ardenmoor, tucked between a drainage contract renewal for the Harwick sector and a census revision affecting three formerly disputed border villages in the east. Oreth dealt with the drainage contract first, as was his practice — smaller items first, to clear the surface and establish momentum — and then the census revision, which required two annotations and a forwarding note to the district registrar. Only then did he take up the Dael file.

It was not, technically, a requisition. The form was internal to the Serenity Protocols office, Tier Two Assessment, escalation category: preventive residential arrangement. The distinction mattered. A requisition implied external transaction. This was an administrative determination, generated entirely within a system designed for exactly this kind of outcome, signed at the appropriate tier level by three assessment officers none of whom knew each other and all of whom had reviewed the file independently. The system, as Oreth had designed it, did not require any single person to hold the whole weight.

He read the summary.