Kessa put her finger against the empty vessel.
“That,” she said, “is the household that already relied on your promise.”
Across the model, the upstream volunteer held his gate shut. He looked from her to the instruction card.
“I followed it.”
“You did.”
He had the strained expression of a man who had volunteered to demonstrate a procedure and discovered he was representing an injustice.
Kessa took the card so everyone could see the sentence. A maintainer could decline a new transfer and disconnect the local coupler. The words were plain. So was the water sitting upstream of her empty receiving vessel.
Felix leaned over the model. “We treated the next transfer as if nobody had already planned around it.”
