It was not Oven holding the red light beyond the upper shutter.
The senior duty officer held the lamp aloft. After the alarm in the archive, she had demanded the full text of the salt-treatment order. Beside her stood four of Oven's former subordinates. Facing them, seven guards from the new watch held their weapons ready.
Oven himself lay beside the manual drive. White salt had entered the open wound in his throat, and every breath came in a short gasp. He could not speak.
The new watch commander held up Rador's order: keep the upper shutter closed until the fuel cut-off was complete. The senior duty officer held up another sheet, issued that same morning: if the storm broke through, open the outer route for hospital trains. Both documents bore a genuine seal.
In the past, Oven would have chosen the more recent order. Now he took a piece of coal and wrote one question on the floor: "Who are we shutting in?"
The commander answered with a district number. Oven crossed out the figure and pointed to the narrow gap in the shutter. Beyond it, the windows of a train shone. In the first carriage people were maintaining pressure with a hand pump; in the others lay those whom the Chamber had already declared fuel.
Among the new watch stood the young guard who had been the first to lower his weapon in the archive shaft. Then he had asked whether his name would be recorded. Now the same man demanded to see the list of passengers declared dangerous.
There was no list. The Chamber had assigned the status to the entire district and had not assessed anyone individually.
The young guard asked Oven whether that meant the order was unlawful. The former captain could not answer aloud, so beside his first question he wrote: "I don't know." Then he added: "That is why I won't close the door."
To some of the watch, the admission of doubt sounded like weakness. To those who remembered the old Oven, it proved he had changed: before, the captain would have called an order clear precisely because he did not know its consequences.
"They're carrying out an order," the commander said.
Oven knocked on his burn, then on the communication pipe. The copper plate had already gone to Saya, but her recording returned in red flashes: a false service frequency assembled from the White Bell and a verb from the archive.
The senior duty officer asked whether anyone had seen Marek's instruction with their own eyes. No one had. Three guards lowered their weapons. Four remained at the salt throwers because they considered the forgery irrelevant: the network was violating the cut-off regardless.
Oven wrote a second question: "What will happen to the train?"
The watch commander did not know. The order said nothing about what was to happen to the passengers after the shutter closed.
The shooting began when the senior duty officer turned the first key. One salt charge struck the wall; a second shattered the red lamp. Oven's former subordinates did not return fire at the men. They overturned a metal table, shielded the drive and kept pulling the counterweight.
The shutter rose by the width of a palm.
Beyond that, a jammed tooth on the outside held it fast. Over the years salt had eaten into the groove and turned the iron to white stone. The internal drive could no longer shift it.
Oven struck the rail twice, left a long pause, then struck it three more times. The senior duty officer repeated the signal with the red lamp from her belt.
Below the wall, Beran saw the answer.
Forty paces of open track lay between the train and the tooth. The rain pressed the ash forms against the rails. An ordinary seam could not reach the mechanism, and a holder would stick in the salt.
That left a forgeman.
Marek could direct one of his eleven direct sparks, but a forgeman's strike burned up the form itself and two beside it. Since the common connection had been broken, the neighbouring sparks belonged to the shift mistress's track node. The decision was not his.
The shift mistress called in the workers who would have to open the way for the train. One suggested waiting until the stove made three more forms. That would take seven minutes, and the hospital steam in the carriage was failing. Another demanded that they bring a shield up to the wall first, but the wet rail would not bear its weight.
Beran stated the price without rounding: three sparks would die, the tooth might not give way, and they would have nothing with which to strike again before the next cycle.
The workers agreed. They recorded the decision beside the manual points, where the passengers in the first carriage could see it.
Three sparks lay down one behind another. The front one took the form of a forgeman, and the two behind gave it their heat. Marek could not hear them or hasten the joining. The shift mistress gave the command.
The forgeman travelled forty paces along the wet rail. Water stripped ash from it, and salt burned through its side. At the tooth, the form stopped so that it would not strike before the shutter reached the required position.
Beran looked at the red lamp above the shutter. Oven waited beside the drive.
The mechanic began the seven-second count. For six seconds the people inside pulled the counterweight. On the seventh, Oven released it, and for an instant the weight came off the tooth.
The forgeman struck.
Three sparks vanished in a single white flame, and the tooth split, but a piece of metal remained in the groove. The shutter rose another half a carriage-height and stopped again.
It was not enough clearance for the wheels. But people could pass through the gap.
In the rain, the carriers could not hold their shape in the air. The local operators stretched them into flat ribbons across the carriage roofs. Two track workers secured each ribbon. They lifted the bedridden through a hatch, carried them over the roof of the leading carriage and passed them into the hands of the guards beyond the wall.
The first person they carried out was a child with blue lips. The senior duty officer received him on the other side, though her order named the entire train as a carrier of the threat. Then came the sick, the elderly and those who had lost their memory of the route.
An elderly woman handed over her husband's copper box before she allowed them to lift her. One guard wanted to leave the box below the wall as a contaminated object. Saya relayed by red lamp that consent to move it remained in dispute, but an echo could not be destroyed without examination.
Oven pointed to a separate empty crate. They sealed the box inside and recorded its owner's name. Last time, he had closed a carriage too soon because a disputed memory obstructed the execution of an order. Now he held up the flow of people until they found a separate place for one questionable object.
Yuna stood at the first window with a red lantern. The storm created false trains nearby, and several nodes had already mistaken them for the real evacuation. The girl held five flashes until the sixth answer came from the shutter. Only then did the carriers move on to the next carriage.
At the third carriage, the answer was delayed. Oven saw five flashes and reached for the drive, but stopped his hand. Seven years ago he had heard both the five knocks from Ella's carriage and the sixth answer from outside, yet had still released the salt. Now the former captain held the shutter open until the young guard had checked the roof and given the answer himself.
Only after the sixth flash did Oven change the lever's position.
The wait cost them another salt charge. It also saved a carrier that had caught beneath the edge of the roof and had not reached the safe gap in time.
Above them, a salt charge punched through the table. A fragment entered the senior duty officer's shoulder. Oven could have crawled into the side shaft, but then the counterweight would have crushed the shutter down on the people in the gap.
He stood beneath the lever and took the weight on his back.
The watch commander saw that Oven was keeping the way open neither for the network nor to win back his rank. Beneath the shutter passed people whom the old order had not even required them to count.
Two more guards lowered their salt throwers and took their places beside him at the lever.
They carried the last bedridden passenger out of the leading carriage. The others waited while Beran cleared the way for the wheels.
Then the full note of the White Bell travelled through the salt-encrusted Ring.
The full note was stronger than the false voice and offered no task. It sought each operator's memory key so that it could erase the key along with the right to stop.
All one hundred and twenty stoves heard it at once.
Open in the reader