Dressed in White

The order is cracking, and a failing order turns cruel. The signs the headlines always explained away — the sores, the fouled water, the darkness settling over the fen — have stopped being deniable, and the sweeps have reached Aldcaster at last.

Arthur Sutton is sixty-five. He kept the registers of a dead parish for forty years; now he keeps a living remnant instead — twenty-odd souls, meeting where they can. And he is learning the watchman's last and hardest lesson: that he cannot keep his people safe. He can only keep them awake.

His granddaughter, kind and good at her job behind the system's screens, has begun to see what that job has been part of.

The forms are all burned away now. What remains is only what was ever really there.