By the morning of the eleventh day, the Chamber was already salting the rails, while the lower circle was still arguing over whether it had the right to save itself according to Marek's plan.
On Beran's map, one hundred and twenty old stoves formed an uneven ring. Nine were working. Eighteen recovered casings held parts of the evidence but had no memory keys. The remaining ninety-three had to be found beneath laundries, warehouses and sealed entrances to homes built after the old railway was closed.
Two hundred and three track workers split into crews. Some cleared salt from the hand points, while others listened for pipes beneath the floor. Beran moved among them with a metal hook in place of his shattered hand. He could not tighten a nut with both hands, but the tremor in the hook told him where an old pipe was still holding pressure.
At the first junction, the workers asked which branch they should restore first. The route to the hospital quarter was shorter, but three times as many people lived near the bread ovens. In the past, a Chamber dispatcher would have chosen one route and recorded the other as an acceptable delay.
Beran set two blank keys on the table.
"The hospital crew is responsible for its route, and the bread crew for theirs. If one section fails, the other doesn't have to repeat its mistake."
And so the repairs began not with a single queue, but with two independent decisions.
Meanwhile, Yuna was handing out panes of red glass. There was not enough cloth, and white paint was already hiding the mittens and scraps tied to the carriages. The girl taught the children to place a lamp at every safe turning: one long light meant the way was clear, two short lights warned of salt, and five knocks asked them to stop and wait for the sixth answer.
At first the old people refused to take orders from a child. Yuna did not argue. She led them along the branch line with their eyes closed and let each of them check where the red light reflected from the rail. After the third turning, a former coupling man suggested raising the lamps so the carriers would not block the signal. Yuna accepted the suggestion and entered it in the common log under his name.
By midday, the red road linked the hospital, the bread ovens and three exits to the dead branch lines. It worked without sparks and did not depend on Marek's voice.
Starting the eighteen recovered casings proved harder than repairing them.
Every stove needed a living operator. The operator had to name a memory that helped them distinguish their own decision from another man's order, even under a strike from the White Bell. The memory was not consumed in ordinary work. It became a key, which meant the salt could destroy it along with the node.
Saya explained the cost separately at every stove. They could not tell someone only that the key would start production and keep silent about the possible loss. They could not accept a memory of someone else's life. They could not choose a beautiful sacrifice on behalf of the person who would afterwards have to live without it.
At the first stove, Dara named the morning when her mother first trusted her with the bread heat unsupervised. If the key died, Dara would retain everything she knew about her mother, but forget the precise moment when she had been recognised as a stove-setter.
"Could you still work without it?" Marek asked.
"I could. But I couldn't prove to myself why I had the right."
The people of her street were not voting for Marek or against Rador. They were deciding whether they were willing to trust Dara with stopping their node. The bakers agreed first, then the families by the steam pipe. Three people demanded a separate cut-off that could be closed from outside, and Beran installed it before the start-up.
Only then did Dara turn the key.
The stove released six sparks, and not one of them heard a common order. The local people gave them their first tasks: check the flue, carry water to the cellar, mark the position of a Salt Guard patrol. Marek added nothing.
At the next casing, the argument lasted two hours. The leader of the rescued repair shift offered the memory of the first train she had stopped on her own. The workers objected: she would need that very skill during the night. So she chose the sound of her father opening the workshop each morning. The cost was personal, but it did not take away her ability to lead people.
The mother of the dead stoker came to the third stove with the log of names. Her neighbours asked her to become its operator: after her circuit of the lower circle, they trusted her more than any official. She refused. The memory of her daughter could not become a key merely because it moved the others more deeply than other memories did.
Instead, the woman demanded that every node keep a list of what its operator had agreed to lose, and a separate list of what they would surrender under no circumstances. If a strike made someone forget that boundary, their neighbours would have to name it for them. Saya added the rule to the open log, and only after that did another four streets consent to start their stoves.
In one of those votes, the residents chose not the bravest candidate but an old plumber who had demanded two deputies in advance. He named the memory of his first wage packet and asked them to record that fear did not cancel consent. When the stove lit, the plumber was trembling so badly that he could not hold the key. His deputy turned it with him. The node heard both of them and accepted neither voice as the only one.
Eleven streets refused to start their stoves at all. In some places they found nobody willing to become the operator. Elsewhere, the residents did not believe Marek would refrain from taking control later. All eleven refusals remained in the log without a white mark and without punishment.
Because of the votes, the network grew more slowly than its supplies allowed. Dara had calculated the residue in advance: after eleven cycles, the communal stores should still contain three hundred and sixty kilograms of purified mineral ash and twelve thousand measures of heat from service machinery. Not a single human echo was included in the reserves.
Twenty-seven stoves ran for eleven seven-minute cycles. They could have created one thousand seven hundred and eighty-two new sparks, but several batches were stopped because of damp draughts and two disputed keys. By evening, the surviving six hundred and eighty-three forms had been joined by another one thousand seven hundred and seventeen.
A new figure appeared in the open log: two thousand four hundred sparks, twenty-seven active nodes, twenty-seven operators. The workers were still bringing another ninety-three casings back into service.
Marek kept twelve direct lines for himself. The remaining forms took their tasks from their own streets.
The network reinforced the rails, moved the sick out of cooling homes and watched the salt crews, all at the same time. Mirrors led patrols through empty tunnels. Seams closed cracks in steam pipes. Carriers went in pairs with living orderlies and stopped if the person changed the route.
In the square of the upper circle, Rador presented this work as proof of the danger. Two thousand four hundred forms could occupy every approach to the Chamber within an hour. The white loudspeakers repeated the number without listing the tasks or naming the operators.
Marek wanted to answer with a general broadcast, but Saya stopped him.
"The city will hear only two people arguing over who owns the network. Let the people whose stoves are already working speak."
Dara spoke only about her own street. The shift leader spoke about the hand-worked routes. Yuna relayed the list of red lamps and never once said the Shepherd's name.
For the first time, the growth of the network did not look like the growth of Marek's power.
Before sunset, a listener returned from the salt square. A Chamber patrol had passed three stoves even though it could have smashed their shutters. Not one guardsman had turned towards the ash stores.
Rador's people were not hunting the forms.
They were going to Dara's house.
At that same moment, the red lamps went out in another ten operator streets. The salt groups had chosen neither the stoves nor the rails. They had found the people whose memories held the nodes.
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