On the fourth day I made it to the window.
The city looked worse than it had under the Crown. Water was carried in barrels, the platforms stood idle, and the free beasts helped only where they chose to. Lists of the missing and duty rosters hung on the walls.
Lenny sat in the courtyard beside the monkey, who had refused to enter the infirmary.
"I would have made her before," he said. "Now I sit out here."
The Provisional Council met in the academy dining hall. There was no seat at the head of the long table, and the argument over water took two hours. They divided the defensive wall into seven sectors, each with its own power supply and public decision logs.
The southern sector was the first to come close to failing. Its representative demanded that the pumps be taken from the dyers' district: debtors lived there, while the grain warehouses stood in the south. Taya arrived in a wet coat and laid a list on the table of the houses that had been flooded to save the northern wall.
"You can take the pumps," she said. "First write down which streets will lose their drinking water and who will go there with buckets."
Nobody raised a hand.
Mira proposed a timetable that moved the pumps between the hospitals, the wall and the residential districts every three hours. The southern representative demanded a permanent share for the warehouses.
"Then name the patients we switch off," Mira replied.
The argument continued. The decision was worse than any order issued by the Crown: complicated, slow and dependent on people who might not turn up for their shift. But beside every line stood the name of the person who had chosen it.
Cole refused to take command of the city guard. He agreed to train the sectors and coordinate alarms, but insisted that the right to close the gates belong to the people stationed beside them.
"They can't see the whole city," the rector objected.
"Neither could I when I followed an order."
Leon handed the Council the codes to the family warehouses. Several members proposed leaving him in charge until the end of winter: nobody else knew the Li family's defence system. Leon agreed to explain how it worked, but refused a personal seal.
"If everything stops without me, then Father did build another Crown after all."
Rem proposed preserving the confiscation archive. The residents demanded that it be burned along with the debts.
"If we destroy the names, ten years from now someone will say none of it happened," Lily replied.
Rem laid his own list beside it.
It contained every assessment he had altered on Kane's orders. Three hundred and twelve entries. Twenty-seven were marked: beast died before reassessment.
"Start the archive with me," Rem said. "Otherwise it will be another record of someone else's guilt."
The woman whose daughter owned the stone dog asked why the assessor's name needed to be kept when the beast was already free.
"Because a year from now I'll remember only the signatures I corrected."
They kept the archive. Access to personal memories was restricted to the victims themselves, while the ownership records were made public.
The debts were annulled. The evidence remained.
The Li family assets were transferred to district funds. Rem insisted that I be paid the value of the stolen titanic core. I took enough for treatment, reconnaissance and compensation for Arden, and left the rest in a publicly supervised fund.
Freedom did not rid the city of conflict. It merely took away the mechanism that had labelled violence order before it began.
Before the trial, Cole showed me the witness list. My name was near the end.
"Kane wanted you first," he said. "Then the trial would have become a duel between two powerful men all over again."
The woman from the dye works came first. Arden was second. Then Rem, Leon, Mira and the families from the living archive.
The story began long before the attempt to arrest me.
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