The silence that settled over the toll circle was heavy with the cold reality of mountain warfare. Twenty-four Host spear guards stood in their double rank, their iron armor glinting dull grey under the pale morning sun, while behind Kezra the ten basin miners gripped their sledgehammers with white-knuckled tension.
For a single, fleeting heartbeat, an old impulse flared behind Kezra’s ribs.
Her Quarter lock had expired at dawn. The status slate in her bonded survey notebook was clear. She held two live Plot addresses approved in her ledger: the communal Seed Store down on Alderfast’s middle terrace, and the bare stone Sorting Yard above Shaft Number Three. Both were sixteen paces square by eight paces deep (16 × 16 × 8 paces).
If she opened her notebook right now, drew her breath. Then she spoke the activation formula, she could exchange those two parcels at the same time.
And what would happen?
The cold logic of the class stripped away the illusion before she could even reach for her buckle. If she swapped the Seed Store with the Sorting Yard, she would move sixty sacks of seed grain from a dry wooden barn into an open, wind-scoured scree slope three hundred paces away, while dumping twenty tons of broken lead ore onto the cabbage terraces. It would startle Hest’s horses for ten seconds, leave thirty armed soldiers standing on unchanged ground, trigger a twenty-four-hour global lock across all her scales, and waste one of her two live addresses on…
