I’m sure that the sight of the Citadel of Moonstone City descending from the clouds and floating south at a fast walking space was absolutely magnificent but I didn’t get to see it. I was indoors, doing my part to turn the chaos of the evacuation into something approaching order.

The Safehold was a vast space beneath the Citadel. It was divided up into dormitories and communal kitchens and work spaces. It smelled a little dusty and unused but there was no smell of damp or mould. Either there was magic of some sort at play or there were people who came down here regularly to keep it clean and dry.

Every building on the Citadel had at least one staircase leading down into the Safehold. Amris told me that there were other exits from the Safehold to be used in an emergency but they weren’t in use while people were streaming in from the surface.

The Mayor had co-opted me onto the Emergency Council not because of his personal fondness for me, or my status as an Outlander, but because I was one of the very few Survivor types in the city. Suddenly I was in charge of ensuring that the survivors of Moonstone continued to survive.

My first ruling was that we needed information. We needed to know how many people we had to feed and water. We needed to know what supplies and skills they had brought in with them. We needed to know the quantity and condition of the provisions that the city had put aside.

Fortunately I had the staff of the Archive, the Library and the City Council Building to call upon. The collection, ordering and storage of information were their specialities. I spotted a few familiar faces in the group and pulled them aside. I already had Amris from the Library but I knew I might need him for something else so I grabbed Anika Madder, Jethro’s girlfriend.

I broke the news that Jethro hadn’t made it to the Citadel in time. She was upset that she couldn’t be with him but relieved that he’d been alive and well when I saw him and that he planned to get out of the city. I asked if she would welcome the distraction of work or if she needed some time to process it. Anika scoffed at the idea that she would have the time to worry about her own feelings while the Citadel was under attack.

I spoke to Ursula, Gertrude’s gnome assistant, and explained where Gertrude was. I asked her to co-ordinate the Archive staff in Gertrude’s absence. Ursula found a pile of clipboards somewhere and handed them out, to the delight of the rest of the staff. Soon there was a nerd army under her command, spreading out through the crowd of civilians and wielding their clipboards like shields. I made it known that if they found any Outlanders, Survivor types, or anyone with high tier cooking skills that they were to bring them directly to me.

One of the Mayor’s assistants, a colourful Parrot-kin called Devin, recognised me and asked how the Council staff could help. I told him that I needed a detailed accounting of all the stores in the Stronghold. He immediately rallied the rest of the staff to find the records of the information and then check them against what was actually in the stores.

I wouldn’t be able to do my Survivor thing until I had all the numbers I needed so Amris and I set up a desk and some seating. Our greatest resource was also our greatest liability. The sheer number of people in the Safehold meant that there were bound to be some people with very useful skills and some who could grind their way to those skills with a little mentoring. Moonstone welcomed Outlanders and kept our history for us. It was time for us to repay the city.

###

The Stores team finished their first task well before the interview team. I left Amris to deal with assembling the skills mentoring team and prepared to face my old nemesis, Maths.

The news was mostly good. The potable water stores were huge and still fresh. The water was stored in kegs and protected by stasis spells. There had been no spell failures. I couldn’t work out exactly how long the stored water would last until I knew how many people we had to supply but I already knew that we were measuring the time in weeks, possibly months.

Whoever had laid down the food supplies had known what they were doing. They’d picked a lot of dried beans and other pulses that had a long shelf life, even without stasis magic, and had a good nutritional profile. They’d added a lot of nuts, high in fat and protein, the sort of thing to keep bellies full and bodies fuelled. There were some cured meats, in containers labelled “for morale”. There were also huge crates of dried berries and barrels of citrus juices protected with multilayered stasis spells. At least we wouldn’t have to worry about scurvy.

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One of my Survivor type abilities told me how many calories there were in any food. I still had to add up all those calorific values but the notes the Stores team had taken were good enough that I could just add the values to the tables they’d laid out. It took me four tries to be sure I’d got all the long multiplication correct and then three tries to be sure of all the additions but in the end I had a total number of calories of food in storage that I was fairly confident about. It was a very large number. But then there was also a large number of people to be fed. I just didn’t know how large yet.

I did the maths again while I waited to find out how large the number of people was. The total calories didn’t change which tended to suggest that I’d got the calculations right.

Ursula approached, holding a clipboard that was somehow slightly fancier than every other clipboard I’d seen. “I’ve got the population estimate,” she said. “It’s probably not 100% accurate, people being what they are, and the team are still doing skill interviews, but it should be enough for some estimates.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I already planned to round everything up if only because it makes the maths easier.”

“Better get to wrangling those numbers,” said Ursula, “I hear the Mayor is on his way. I can keep him off your back to give you time but not indefinitely. Probably about twenty minutes.”

“Thank you. Whatever Gertrude pays you it’s not enough.”

Ursula grinned at me, “Eh, the wages are pretty good but I stay because of the annual cardigan from Geraldine.” She suddenly looked downcast. “Oh Geraldine didn’t make it to the Safehold by the way. As far as we know she’s fine but she’s not here.”

“We’ll draw straws for who gets to tell Gertrude when she comes round,” I said.

“If we’re lucky Rolly will do it,” said Ursula, and she left me to the numbers.

###

By the time the Mayor extricated himself from Ursula’s distraction I was fairly sure I had an answer for him.

The Mayor arrived with an entourage of hangers on but he shooed them away when he saw the look on my face. “How bad is the news?” he said.

“That depends on whether we’re fleeing to a location with no supplies or if we’re trying to stay ahead of the Ostian forces indefinitely,” I said.

“Just tell me how long we can hold out for,” he said.

“If we don’t ration food at all, and we also don’t manage to secure any major new food sources then we’re good for about six weeks. If we ration with the idea of optimal nutrition and avoiding hunger then that only gives us roughly an extra week and a half, but it would be much better for morale than not rationing at all.”

“Rationing is good for morale?” said the Mayor.

“Everyone knows we have a finite food supply. If they feel like no-one is managing that supply then people are likely to start policing each other’s eating habits.”

I saw sufficient alarm on the Mayor’s face to convince me that he understood how dangerous that could be.

I went on, “If we’re willing to accept a little hunger but want people to be capable of remaining active then we can get ten weeks. People may be a bit miserable about it but it shouldn’t trigger too much resistance. Half rations would get us fifteen weeks, and people would be a lot more unhappy about that. We’d start to see some loss of performance at that level but the biggest problem would be parents, particularly mothers, skimping on their own rations to feed their children extra. This can lead to the mothers, who may be vital to the morale of their family group, becoming frail and malnourished.”

“Noted,” said the Mayor, “We’d need food monitors to make sure that everyone is eating their own rations, and that those rations are sufficient for everyone. There may be some Beast-Kin or Orc-Kin who just need more food than others.”

“And there may be some Beast-kin with different nutritional needs. I’ll have to do some research on that. Hopefully the Library will have something useful,” I said. I paused for a moment before dealing with the part I did not want to talk about. “In order to go much beyond fifteen weeks we need either additional sources of food or we need to put at least some people on starvation rations. With starvation rations you’re not so much keeping people alive as slowing down the rate at which they’re dying. It’ll be terrible for morale at first but then people will be too worn down to resist. They’ll also be in no condition to fight back if we do get attacked.”

I didn’t want to talk about that because there’s a terrible temptation for a man in charge if there’s a diet that will make people too weak to object to your decisions. I felt I had to tell him because a period of starvation rations had to be better than what I suspected the Ostians had in mind.

“Thank you,” said the Mayor. “This needs to go to the Emergency Council for a longer term decision but for now I think we should go to the first Rationing option. Get Ursula to help you put together a Ration guide and then get copies made. I’ll send you someone from the City Council information staff to get some posters and information sheets made.” He turned to go but then stopped. “These are dark days and some people may suffer as a result of the information you’ve given me. None of that will be your fault.”