‘There’s too much.’ The washing floor was outside the barracks: a stone platform with an open pipe above it and a drain below. Itani stood naked in the flow, his hair plastered flat, scrubbing his hands and arms with pumice. The sun, still likely three or four hands above the horizon, was nonetheless lost behind the buildings of the warehouse district. Now they were in shadow; soon it would be night. Liat on her bench leaned against the ivy-covered wall, plucking at the thick, waxy leaves. ‘Amat left everything half-done,’ she went on. ‘The contracts with Old Sanya. How was I to know they hadn’t been returned to him? It isn’t as if she told me to run them there. And the shipments to Obar State weren’t coordinated, so there are going to be three weeks with the third warehouse standing half-empty when it should be full. And every time something goes wrong, Wilsin-cha . . . he doesn’t say anything, but he keeps looking at me as though I might start drooling. I embarrass him.’ Itani stepped out from the artificial waterfall.
