The guard held the controls.
Mara understood it properly only when she came back up to the control room the next morning and looked at the duty board. It was a strip of display set into the wall beside the door, which Orison lit when Caldris asked, and it listed every control in the forge that could be operated from this room, with a status beside each one. Most read open: the lights, the lift, the cradle’s warming setting that Orison could not find. Two did not.
Quench panel: Compact hold.
Relay cabinet: Compact hold.
The quench panel was the set of controls on the glass wall’s frame below the display, where the official signal came in and where, at the quench slot, the cold would be opened to it. The relay cabinet was a tall grey box at the end of the row of chairs, with a seal on its door, through which the lattice’s signals reached the forge. Compact hold meant that neither could be touched without the Compact’s authority. And the Compact’s authority, in this room, sat in a chair under the display with a slip of paper on his knee: Post 4, the round-faced guard, who watched Mara’s hands every time she came near either one.
