The Record Counts

Forty mornings. One stolen minute. One no.

In Wren Delacroix's city, only words said face to face count, and only what a clerk writes into the Record is true. Last winter her aunt walked into her own hearing and said I never agreed, and forty families who had read their own people out of the Record stood up and unsaid it. Now forty clerks have come down the Line from the capital with hand bells, one hearing a morning, to decide what those forty petitions are worth. Wren is named in every one of them.

Every morning the clerk's bell closes the book a minute before the tower rings the half. The whole District can feel it. Nobody can say so, because after the pen, nothing counts, and the only clock that could prove it belongs to the capital. On the illegal phones after dark, a ring of kids has started counting the minute out loud, and the children on Wren's street count it in the road the way they skip rope.

Wren has one no, and forty rooms to spend it in. Her words come with stones, and the stones are hers. In the one room where every word is kept, she will have to learn what a silence is worth, who counts, and when to let the stone come.

The Record Counts is book three of The Record, a young adult series about voices, faces, and who gets believed. It follows The Record and The Record Stands.