Pell’s reduction began at the second bell of the afternoon.
He had organized it in a morning. Mara did not know how. She had gone to sleep for two hours after the guild left, and when she came down Pell was at the yard’s relay console with his slate and a list, and the dormitory children who had stood by the board were sitting along the low wall outside the forge with slates of their own, and every one of them was talking to a different street.
“Fifty minutes,” Pell said, when she asked. “From the second bell. Every house in the Low Brace turns off everything it can. Heaters to the lowest notch. Lamps off. Ovens off. The bakery’s agreed to bank its oven, and the tannery’s shut its press.” He read from his list. “The district’s load drops. The brace gets its hour, near enough. The houses get theirs after.”
“How many houses?”
“All of them that answered,” Pell said. “Which is most.” He looked at his slate. “Sixty-one with children on the reserve list said yes first. Then the others.”
At the second bell, the Low Brace went quiet.
Mara had expected it to feel like a shortfall. She had lived through shortfalls: the winter the Directorate cut the Low Brace to half-heat for nine days, the night the river mains froze and the pump house went dark. Those had felt like something taken. People in the lanes with their collars up, angry, children crying in cold…
