They carried the pilot assembly to the meeting instead of asking the meeting to imagine it.
Dorra supplied a wheeled stand. Rian secured the bypass chamber and its three gauges. Bram chose the route, rejected a stair that would have made the whole display ridiculous and hired two carriers for the last turn. Iven pushed beside them until the stand reached the covered public yard outside the allocation hall.
It looked smaller there than it had beneath the clinic.
A box, a spring, a set of return pipes. No shining answer to a city’s fear. The important work lay in which change could pass through it without taking something else away.
Sera arrived with the clinical records. Halden brought the corrected stores account. Arel had the staffing and relocation conditions. None of them carried a clean version that omitted the failed first spring.
The allocation group met in a room opening onto the yard. Ward representatives sat alongside the heat board, stores office and food cooperatives. Hearth’s grain exports had supported other cities for years. The question of what it could spare now had already become an argument before Iven arrived.
A woman from the milling wards asked him to state what he wanted.
