The link was open on the frame yard’s speaker, and every voice in Cinder seemed to be on it.
The frame yard was the Quiet Forge’s outer hall, now, with the replacement heart’s carriage on its track through the inner chamber’s door, and the frame plate on the wall with the abort route cut into it. Eshel had wired the relay’s speaker to the hall’s ceiling so the crew could hear it from anywhere. It was the ninth hour and a half. Thirty minutes to the swap.
The swap needed a load reduction. Across all of Cinder. The largest the city had ever made.
Eshel had worked it in the afternoon. When the old heart came out of its seat, for the forty-three seconds of the swap, Hearth’s output would drop. The brace would carry the bridge; nothing would carry the city. If the city was drawing its normal load at that moment, the drop would black out every district at once. If the city’s load was down, far down, the drop might pass without the lights going out.
So the city’s load had to come down. Everywhere. For one agreed minute, from the tenth hour.
Pell had organized it.
