Meridian’s council met in the pump hall’s long room, because it was nearest the basin.
They came down the service stair in the first hour of the night, as day nineteen turned into twenty. The terraces’ delegates. The hospitals’. The poor districts’ from the lower terraces. A clerk from the Directorate. They stood among the great iron mains with the pumps thumping at the far end, and the guild carried out the table again, and the Board clerk set her recorder on it.
Mara stood at the table’s side. Sen beside her, with 40 on the back of her glove. Caldris at the back by the window. Lisan was on the relay screen at the table’s end, from the keepers’ hall at Lorn, with his custody sheet in front of him.
Pell was on the water council link. Mara had asked Eshel to patch him in from Cinder. His voice came through the clerk’s recorder small and flat.
The council hesitated.
Mara saw it at once. In the way they stood. In the way the terrace delegate looked at the plan on the table, the blue wash of the basin, and then away.
Meridian’s terrace districts had never endured more than a scheduled interruption. A day’s notice. A posted time. A crew at the valve and the water back on by evening. They had never been asked to choose.
