The children of Ember Wash had learned to find winter strawberries by the warmth of the paving stones. Now they walked the same street carrying their sleeping mats away from home.
Iven saw three of them on the afternoon of day 1213, after three travel days along the fifty-four-kilometer heat road from Harth Bend. The oldest carried a birdcage with a cloth over it. The youngest dragged the end of a rolled blanket until his sister stopped, put down her mat and tied the roll shorter. Nobody was running. Someone had made the decision early enough for them to carry the bird.
The settlement lay in a shallow quarry whose pale walls held the sun. An old furnace occupied its eastern end, above workshops, a laundry and two streets of houses. Behind the furnace rose the stone throat of a natural heat vent. Water pipes entered the rock below it and returned through the heating room, where workers could reduce the exchange before sending warm water toward the town.
That was the arrangement on the plan. The housing branch had become hotter while the furnace crew reduced its own feed.
“We shut that branch on day 1209,” said Lessa Vorn, the keeper who met them at the upper road. “It is still shut. The residents are moving because the old service floor stayed hot, not because we left boiling water running through their rooms.”
