Eli asked for a number because he could feel the city asking through him.
How many living holders. How many households. How many people should run, whether they had transport or not. Juno had described a possible path by which collapse could burn people connected to the reservoir, and his mind wanted a figure large enough to command action or small enough to make action possible.
She gave him neither.
“I can’t establish the population,” she said. “I can’t establish equal effect across contracts. I can’t establish which portions could be isolated first.”
“An estimate.”
“From what denominator?”
He looked at the outward path on the model. It contained one marker for an unknown number of people. Moving more markers onto it would make it frightening without making it more true.
“Then what do we tell them?”
