Beran did not shout for Marek to pull harder on the brake. The old track master knew that harder now meant breaking the last working linkage.
He lay down at the edge of the platform, thrust his metal palm between the rails and struck the side plate seven times. Then he released it and repeated the same rhythm.
Seven seconds of pressure. A brief release. Another seven.
Marek recognised the technique. That was how they had stopped carriages before the city circuits, when a man felt the recoil through his whole body and kept the metal from overheating. Beran's left palm felt nothing. So the old man counted aloud and watched the colour of the rail.
It was Beran who had once taught Marek to listen to the track. After the city drives replaced the manual points, the old man had been reassigned to inspecting sidings. The Chamber considered his knowledge obsolete, and his metal palm the result of dangerous insubordination.
Beran had lost his hand seven years ago. The signal circuit ordered a goods train through although a repair shift was working ahead. The old man tore off the chain and held the manual brake until the last worker was clear of the track. The report said the accident had been caused by his insubordination. It did not contain a single line about the people he had saved.
Now that same insubordination was the carriage's only chance.
Marek assigned the sparks.
Two stayed at the coupling. Three listeners went under the floor and relayed a map of the vibrations. The last made her way along the outer shell to Beran so he could hear instructions through her knocks.
Marek himself threw his weight onto the lever.
"Seven!" Beran shouted from outside.
Marek released it.
The carriage dropped several centimetres. The passengers screamed, but the brake held.
"Another seven!"
Marek pressed down again.
The girl in the red mitten sat by the pipe and counted with them. Every time she reached the fifth knock, she stopped, lost her place and began again.
Five knocks.
Marek knew that rhythm.
When he was twelve, Ella used to beat a spoon against a cracked kettle. Five times when she was afraid of the dark. He would answer with a sixth knock on the wall, so his little sister knew he was there.
Without thinking, Marek knocked once more on the lever.
The girl fell silent and stared at him.
"That's better," she said. "Six means somebody answered."
The memory vanished as quickly as it had come. The carriage lurched again, and one of the sparks reported a rusted branch line beneath the main track. It ran only two metres below. If they turned the old manual points and released the carriage at the right moment, the wheels might jump onto the repair siding.
The problem was that the points were outside.
Beran crawled towards them along the wet rail. The rain was getting heavier. Water streamed over his metal palm and dripped into the lowland.
Several sparks were already carrying two lines each. A new task did not require a new body, but every separate instruction added another connection for Marek.
Marek created a new task: hold Beran with a safety strap.
Then another: tell the passengers when to duck.
Then a third: check the right wheel.
On the thirteenth independent task, he forgot why he was holding the lever.
He did not lose consciousness. He did not weaken. For a few terrible moments, he simply stopped being able to tell his own will from the rhythm of the sparks. One wanted to find the points. Another wanted to hold the bracket. A third was straining to get outside. All those desires felt like his own.
Marek's fingers opened.
Yuna noticed before the adults did. She stopped counting and seized his sleeve with her bare hand.
"Where are you looking?"
Three places appeared before Marek at once: the rusted slot beneath Beran, the dark void under the carriage and the bracket held by the dying spark. His own body seemed like one more task, the quietest and therefore the least necessary. If he released the lever, one of the twelve lines would go on searching for a way through. The choir did not understand that the person giving the order could die too.
Irsa did not wait for permission. She struck Marek's wrist with cold and severed the newest connection. Nausea swept through him. He remembered his name, drew breath and felt his shoulder beneath the lever again.
For the first time, the useless spark had decided for herself which command could not be kept.
The world returned all at once: the weight of the lever, the pain in his shoulder, the girl by the pipe, the carriage over the void.
Twelve. He could not hold more than twelve direct tasks.
"Ready!" Beran had reached the manual points.
He fitted his metal palm into the slot in place of his left hand and turned with his whole body. The points did not move. Rust held them tighter than a lock.
Marek sent the last free spark to Beran. She slipped into the gap, heated the old grease and began to whiten. The moment the lever gave, Irsa drove her out of the slot with a pulse of cold.
Now all that remained was to release the brake at the exact moment between two knocks.
"Seven," Beran said.
Marek pressed down.
"Release!"
The carriage broke loose.
The wheels struck the edge of the upper rail and threw the passengers to the floor. Metal shrieked outside. One listener was washed off the roof into the gutter, and the second dived after her. The rain blurred their forms and smothered the connection, and Marek felt two empty spaces like missed heartbeats. Only when the carriage stopped did both sparks crawl out of the gutter beneath the undercarriage and answer again.
But the lower branch line took the weight.
The first impact struck the rear bogie. The second travelled through the whole body of the carriage and tore two lamps from their mountings. The lattice of tied straps held the passengers against the walls. The man who had wanted to smash the window shielded the apothecary with his body. Yuna kept hold of the pipe and counted all the way to seven, though her lips were trembling.
The repair siding was shorter than Beran remembered. A brick wall stood at the end. Marek pressed down on the brake again, but the holder at the coupling had already crumbled. Then the passengers pulled together on the linked handrails. The carriage slowed not because of a single order, but because dozens of people took up the same rhythm.
The buffer struck the wall and cracked the bricks, but the wheels stayed on the rails.
Beran did not climb down onto the roof until he had checked both bogies. His metal palm had bent in the slot of the points, and the old man straightened the fingers against the edge of the rail as if it were nothing unusual.
"You held thirteen?" he asked Marek.
"Not for long."
"Not for long the first time. The second time you'll forget to let go."
Beran knew nothing about the nature of the choir, but he recognised the limit at once. He told Marek to name the twelve tasks aloud and check which of them was still needed. Two were already complete, but Marek had kept holding them through sheer inertia. Once he severed the unnecessary connections, his breathing steadied.
That was how the system acquired its first working rule: close an old task before opening a new one. Otherwise the number grew not out in the field, but inside the person.
For several seconds nobody spoke.
Then the girl struck the pipe five times.
Marek answered with a sixth.
People in grey cloaks appeared on the roof. The train guards were in no hurry to help. Their senior officer announced through a loudhailer that the intervention in the quarantine had been ruled unlawful and that all survivors were to remain inside pending a decision from the Chamber.
Beran called back, "Survivors? You just tried to throw them off the viaduct."
No one answered him.
The door opened from outside only as wide as a palm. A silver thread slipped through the gap, drew taut in the air and trembled.
Saya Renn stood behind the door, a conductor of last words. She listened not to the shouting, but to something beneath it.
"The mark is false," Saya said. "There is no storm here."
The girl leapt to her feet.
"Then open the door!"
Saya turned to the woman by the wall. She was no longer breathing.
"First I have to separate her voice from your panic."
The incinerator began to roar beneath the floor. It had been switched on before the conductor had even finished her inspection.
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