The decision had to be made. Meanwhile, they still had four hours of working current before the evening shift change at the border gate. Once the shift changed, Chancellor Morn’s patrols would rotate along the water chute roads, and any sudden fluctuation in the Orchard Ward’s steam output would draw armed inspectors down the switchbacks like flies to an open carcass. In Rookvale, an unexpected pressure drop on the town tracking data board was treated as an act of heavy-duty sabotage, investigated not with questions, but with bayonets and padlocks.
The Orchard Ward was not an isolated farm. It was a precarious terrace suspended sixty meters above the river basin. It was tied to the country energy grid by copper guide-rod cables and high-pressure steam chimney pipes. If Morn noticed a forty-pound drop in the eastern pipe hub. Meanwhile, his inspectors were patrolling the lower rail cut, he would assume the growers were siphoning heat to run illicit moonshine stills or hiding unlisted refugees in the drainage vaults. A single squad of court guards arriving at the gate with cold-iron crowbars would end any chance of clearing the under-road drain before midnight.
Elsi turned to her head tender, a gray-haired woman named Martha whose wrists were wrapped in sulfur-soaked linen to soothe the chronic eczema caused by the greenhouse wash. Martha was sixty years old, with the broad, rounded shoulders of a woman who had shoveled compost and coal for half a century. Her face was lined with deep, soot-stained…
