Voss got his promised time with Felicity while the kettle boiled. They took their cups up to the roof, where he showed her the little yard he'd tried to point out in the dark. Frost was already down there trying the jump by himself, quite sure nobody could see him. By the time he spotted them on the wall and waved, the west-watch runner had come to fetch his parents.
She'd washed the mud off her boots before she met Felicity in the command hall. She'd brought some of it along in a bread tin. Wedged into the clay was a little blue button with a duck on it, the sort a mother put on a child's coat to make doing it up in the morning worth the argument.
"A driver from the northern road found that in his empty cart," the woman said. "I took his report to the west-watch radio. We got their lookout's answer late last night, then lost contact. He'd seen four more carts leave with children. When he went back to look for wheel tracks, all he could see was feet."
