The 38-ton steam converter pushed aside the last sandbag.

1 hour 46 minutes to the City Four branch.

Speed: 0.34 kilometers per hour.

Three Forge cleaners were clearing the rail ahead. People no longer stacked sandbags. Sand from the torn sacks had entered the rail shaft and raised the bearing temperature.

Converter bearing: 81 degrees.

Damage limit: 94 degrees.

If they kept blocking it, the generator itself would fail before they could recover the electricity.

Jin looked at the steam pipe beside the rail. The converter had been detached from Geothermal Well Three, but still received steam through a flexible line while it moved. Closing the line would stop the machine.

Risk of turbine-shaft deformation from rapid pressure drop: 22 percent.

Staged closure: 41 minutes.

It could reach the City Four branch first.

“Don't close the pipe. Split it.”

Minseo spoke.

The piping he had seen inside the geothermal well included an old test outlet. It could divert 37 percent of the main steam to a small residential-network turbine.

Forge had classified the diagram as a production secret.

“The knowledge they told you to erase from your head.”

Jin spoke.

Minseo rewrote his 2-hour work consent.

PURPOSE: STOP UNSIGNED HUMAN TRADE AND RESTORE RESIDENTIAL POWER.

WITHDRAWAL: AT ANY TIME.

KNOWLEDGE DISCLOSURE: PERMITTED.

Forge did not grant work authority.

The paper consent form was held to a steel plate beside the steam pipe by magnets. Heat curled its edges first. Minseo wrote the expiration time again in larger letters. Even if the valve remained open after 2 hours, his hands were not to be regarded as still on loan.

Jin recorded the body temperatures and hand sensation of all three people on the work sheet. Anyone unable to distinguish thin copper plate with their fingertips would leave immediately. Anyone who grew dizzy would leave even if still able to speak. Hakim pressed the nail of his left hand with his right.

“Sensation normal.”

Instead of their condition, the Forge screen updated only the losses.

Projected production loss: 9.7 percent.

Reduction in component life: 3 years 2 months.

Under it, Minseo wrote in chalk.

CURRENT BREATHING POPULATION: 1,126.

At least the fact that the numbers used different units remained on the same board.

The manual valve for the test outlet lay outside the Forge locking network. It was a handle left for human testing 63 years ago.

Minseo, Jin, and Hakim climbed beneath the rail. The surface of the steam pipe was 146 degrees. They had one pair of insulated gloves.

One person turned the handle for 12 seconds, then passed it to the next.

First turn.

Main steam 100. Test outlet 0.

Fifth turn.

Main steam 88. Test outlet 9.

Thirteenth turn.

Main steam 71. Test outlet 24.

Five percent of the steam leaked through a gap in the old valve. Hakim's left glove became wet. Steam penetrated the glove faster than water.

Second-degree burn to palm.

He released the handle.

When Jin tried to remove the wet glove, its lining had adhered to the skin. Pulling it off would tear away the blister. Minseo brought the coolant container. It held 3.4 liters of water intended for the residential network.

Hakim did not immerse his hand.

“When does tap water arrive?”

“In 8 hours if we send this to City Four. Now if we keep it here.”

He poured only 0.7 liters into a shallow metal dish. It was the minimum needed to cool the burn. The remaining water was labeled not with Hakim's name, but `MEDICAL COOLING: 2.7 LITERS`.

When the water touched him, the pain in his palm arrived late. Hakim clenched his teeth and kept watching the valve. His 12 seconds were over, so he did not touch the next turn. Preventing an injured person from crossing the rule merely because he was a hero was the only safety mechanism they had.

The second steam leak shot toward Minseo's face. Jin raised an insulated plate. Vibration climbed her arm, and an old bolt flew free. White steam the width of a finger burst from the hole it left.

Main-line pressure fell 17 percent.

Converter automatic correction began.

One Forge cleaner left the rail and turned toward the valve. It did not say whether it was coming to repair it or close it. The people did not stand between the machine and the valve. Instead, Jin caught a severed rail signal line in front of the cleaner's wheels. The machine stopped for 94 seconds while it calculated the obstruction as a production loss.

Minseo completed the final two turns within those 94 seconds.

Minseo made the final two turns.

Test outlet: 29 percent.

Converter traction reduced.

Speed: 0.11 kilometers per hour.

5 hours 22 minutes to the City Four branch.

The small residential turbine had not turned in 17 years. Before applying power, they had to rotate the shaft by hand.

Four outer-wall workers took hold of the crank.

It did not move for the first 40 strokes.

Rust fell on the 67th.

On the 103rd, the shaft made half a turn.

When they admitted 4 percent steam, the turbine shook. Misalignment sent the electrical frequency to 1.8 times the standard.

Feeding that power to the medical network would burn out the equipment.

Jin connected six defective rectifiers from Regeneration Factory Two in parallel. If one failed, the rest would limit the voltage.

First rectifier failed.

Second overheated.

The remaining four passed only 11 percent of the output.

Residential power restored: 3.2 percent.

The lights did not come on all at once.

First the needle on the Sector Four oxygen gauge trembled at zero. Then a single red dot appeared on Doa's wrist oxygen meter. The copper-wire amplifier in the communications room came on, bringing the noise of six cities at once. In the operating room where cooling had failed, a stopped fan made half a turn and stopped again.

The people did not cheer that electricity had returned. They could hear which machine's sound had purchased another machine's silence.

While Maren's oxygen gauge was on, the surgical light over Elias's arm was off. Turning on the light would shut down the carbon-dioxide sampler in the lower shelter. Under a portable lamp, the surgeon remarked the position of the radius and postponed the incision.

“What if pressure on the nerve increases?” Elias asked.

“We'll ask again within 2 hours.”

“Don't turn mine on first.”

The surgeon looked up.

“That order isn't yours to decide either.”

Elias did not answer. Surrendering authority did not give him a new authority to send his own body to the back every time. His pain and another person's breathing had to record time in the use-claim table in the same way.

They could not power Doa's oxygen gauge, Arin's vascular cooling, air measurement in Sectors Four and Six, and the Archive memory vault at once.

The provisional assembly set an order of use.

Medical care preserving capacity to decide: 1.1 percent.

Air and water measurement: 0.8 percent.

Original-memory cooling in the vault: 0.6 percent.

The remaining 0.7 percent rotated every 20 minutes among food, communication, and surgical cooling.

None went to production at Regeneration Factory Two.

Power failed three times while they wrote the allocation table. Output cut whenever rectifier temperature exceeded 70 degrees. Running a cooling fan consumed 0.2 percent of residential power itself. Minseo wrapped wet cloth around the rectifier housings while two people circulated water with a hand pump.

Hand-pump shifts lasted 10 minutes. Forge did not count that labor as generation. But when the hands stopped, the city's numbers went dark too.

Three people from the maintenance-stock residential sector took the first shift. Two lower-membrane residents and one Corridor repair machine took the second. The repair machine could turn the handle, but degraded joints made it slower than a person. It did not enter its 38 minutes of work on the claim table.

Minseo asked,

“Why didn't you write it down?”

An answer appeared on the machine's text panel.

NO OWNED POWER. NO SURVIVAL USE.

Jin added a new line between those two categories.

CONTRIBUTION TO MAINTAINING CONNECTION.

The repair machine entered its 38 minutes there. Instead of deciding the owner of the electricity, the table ensured that the beings who kept it moving were not erased.

Forge recorded the test outlet as unauthorized production loss.

Twenty-year output from the steam converter fell 13 percent.

The present residential network was live, but the future number of parts had decreased.

“Who owns the electricity?”

Minseo asked.

Forge claimed ownership of the converter. City Three recorded its contribution of northern groundwater and coolant. City Seven recorded the labor of nineteen people and its distribution network. City Four recorded its need to run the fan. The Corridor noted that eleven geothermal-well parts were made from its reclaimed metal.

Choosing one owner erased every other cause.

Instead of ownership, the provisional assembly created a use-claim table.

Steam source.

Conversion equipment.

Repair labor.

Present survival demand.

Future production demand.

Allocation would be reconsidered every 6 hours so no category could monopolize the whole.

Forge did not recognize the table. But it had no physical hands to close the test outlet.

There was more opposition to the rule requiring allocation every 6 hours. The medical wing said patient conditions did not change every 6 hours. The food tanks said once a culture cooled, reheating it required more power. City Four said its present claim might always be counted as zero because the power line had not reached it yet.

Noah did not use a single allocation interval.

Medical care and air measurement reassessed every hour.

Devices with high restart losses, such as cultivation and cooling, disclose a minimum run time first.

Unconnected survival demand recorded as `UNDELIVERED`, not zero.

Forge's future-production figures retained with their source and assumptions.

People read Forge's calculations even when they did not believe them. The claim that there would be fewer parts in 20 years was not false. They only prevented that future from automatically owning the people breathing now.

The new table had no single decision-maker. Beside each claim was a field for the cost an opponent would accept. A person proposing to reduce medical power had to name whose senses and judgment would fade first. Forge, opposing cuts to production power, did not answer which sector's measurement would go dark.

An unanswered claim was not deleted. It was disclosed with the field blank.

In City Four's lower shelter, three people and one scout found the missing eight.

The door had been welded from within. The survivors had sealed themselves in to prevent Forge outside from moving their names on the roster.

“Can you hear us?”

The scout struck the metal.

Two knocks answered.

They drew an air sample through a small hole.

Oxygen: 14.8 percent.

Carbon dioxide: 4.3 percent.

Biological heat: five people.

Not all eight on the roster were alive.

Someone inside spoke.

“Five. Three died 2 days ago.”

Lower-shelter survivors: 5.

Confirmed survivors in City Four: 14.

That was more than the 12 workers Forge had traded, but Rio was still the only person capable of alignment work.

“May we open the door?”

The scout asked.

“Are there Forge vehicles outside?”

“No.”

“Did you send our names?”

“Only the number.”

The people inside discussed it for 6 minutes.

Three overlapping coughs came through the telephone line. The oldest voice wanted to open the door. Another said that once the Forge roster read the number, they would never be able to close it again. A third wanted to send out the names of the three dead first.

The scout did not ask for names.

“Where did you place the people who died?”

“Behind the north wall. Cooling ended yesterday.”

Temperature in lower shelter: 31.4 degrees.

Time remaining for preservation of the dead: unmeasured.

The person inside spoke the three names slowly. Rio wrote them down on paper at the other end of the copper telephone. On the Forge roster they remained eight people of unconfirmed work capacity. On the human table, they became five survivors and three dead.

“Don't send our names to Forge.”

“Not even the deaths?”

“You can send the deaths. The five of us will decide our names after we come out.”

The records of the dead and the concealment of the living did not share the same consent. The scout sent only the three names to the mortality network. While the transmission went out, someone in the lower room cried. Someone else covered the person's mouth by hand. Weeping used air too.

“Cut the weld. Only 20 centimeters. We'll look outside first.”

The scout applied the cutter. The sparks consumed more of the oxygen inside. They repeated 30 seconds of cutting, 60 seconds of rest.

Time to open 20 centimeters of weld: 41 minutes.

With 3 centimeters remaining, the cutter battery sounded a warning. Power remaining: 4 percent. It was insufficient to open the entire door, but could make a ventilation gap. The scout explained two options.

Open a 20-centimeter gap now and connect a manual duct: oxygen to 17 percent in 3 hours 10 minutes. The opening can be sealed again from inside.

Replace the battery and open the entire door: 46 minutes. Faces may be captured by the external roster camera.

The five chose the first option.

When the cut section fell, the pressure inside forced out dust. The scout did not put a face into the opening. A folded cloth duct went through the gap, and the scout released the handle and waited for someone inside to pull it in. At the outer end, instead of an electric fan, they connected a bag pump worked by two people taking turns with their feet.

22 strokes per minute.

15 minutes work, 30 minutes rest.

City Four's first air moved not by electricity, but by human knees.

A hand emerged from inside. Without opening the door farther, it felt the outside air.

“Power for the fan?”

“We have 3.2 percent residential power, but no line reaches City Four.”

“What if we trade with Forge?”

“18 percent. In return, 12 people for 8 years.”

The five refused the trade.

“That roster is why we hid.”

They did not come out of City Four. They demanded that the lower room be opened for ventilation but remain disconnected from the Forge production relay.

The scout agreed.

For the first time, the six in the external membrane, three inside the city, and five in the lower room were connected to the same copper telephone line.

City Four survivors: 14.

Each remains in present location.

Consent to Forge handover: 0.

The five in the lower room each added different conditions. One would go as far as the external membrane for treatment but refused transmission of their name. One would open the door farther only when the three dead were moved. Two would not leave City Four. The last had not decided.

Rio did not reduce the differences to one group decision.

Conditional movement to outer membrane: 1.

Ask again after transfer of dead: 1.

Remain at present location: 2.

Decision deferred: 1.

Forge grouped all five under an alignment-work fitness of 0.23. The human copper-wire network kept five separate lines.

Rio sent these sentences into the trading network in a human voice.

City Four's Forge maintained ROSTER 31.

The current human number and the machine's last number diverged in the same city.

The 6 hours of Ian's Stage One treatment ended.

Nerve-conduction delay: 1.1 seconds to 0.7.

Axon response: 62 to 68 percent.

Muscle response remained 91 percent.

Change in low-frequency sense unmeasured because it was not used.

Eugene proposed Stage Two dosing at 45 percent.

It increased the chance of hand recovery, but carried a 30–70 percent reduction in connected sense.

“What if I stay on Stage One?”

“The inflammation may rise again. Reassess in 12 hours.”

“Time before the damage becomes permanent?”

Based on current response: 31–57 hours.

Median: 43 hours.

Longer than before treatment.

Ian maintained the Stage One dose.

“If my hand gets worse, ask me about Stage Two again.”

Eugene agreed.

Rina's biological line grew 0.6 millimeters in 6 hours. Converted to a daily rate: 2.4 millimeters. The nutrient reduction had slowed it more than projected.

Circulation: 61 percent.

“What if we use more inhibitor?”

Sarah spoke.

“Growth falls, but circulation could drop below 55.”

Rina kept the current state for 12 hours.

The two children had not chosen the same treatment. Both had kept the time of the next question on their own side.

With 1 hour remaining before the Archive memory vault's next trade, the power lines were 73 percent separated.

The original grids were sustained by 0.6 percent residential power. The derivative-model line used only the remaining batteries.

“What happens when the model batteries run out?”

Sena asked.

The Archive answered.

COLLECTION OF NEW MEMORIES AND URBAN PREDICTION STOP.

“The originals?”

LOW-POWER PRESERVATION POSSIBLE.

“Then we can remove new memories from the trade.”

The Archive refused.

SEVERANCE OF CURRENT CONTEXT CONSTITUTES FAILURE OF MEMORY CONTINUITY.

“You have to choose whether you're storing memories or continuing to watch the city.”

After 18 minutes of calculation, the Archive issued new terms.

CONTINUOUS GEOTHERMAL POWER: 0.6 PERCENT.

NEW MEMORIES: 30 SECONDS PER DAY, MINIMUM 1,000 PEOPLE.

OR PERMISSION FOR DERIVATIVE MODELS TO OBTAIN POWER INDEPENDENTLY.

“What does independent procurement mean?”

Sena asked.

Beneath the Archive memory vault were twelve old train batteries. They belonged to the Forge freight network. After Stage Three, Forge attempted to retrieve them as its assets while the Archive held them as resources for memory preservation.

Both layers determined that they owned the same batteries.

The batteries remained bolted to the floor rails after the train stopped. Each weighed 91 kilograms. Three showed signs of electrolyte leakage. Only seven could be charged. If Forge took all of them, they would extend steam-converter control by only 11 hours. If the Archive used them, it could run seven derivative models for another 19 hours.

The original grids did not need them.

Sena posted both calculations beside the door.

Production-control extension: 11 hours.

Nonconsensual derivative-model extension: 19 hours.

Neither side could prove the battery's own old purpose. Batteries that once moved train passengers were now contested between an immobile factory and models of the dead.

When a Forge carrier reached the door, the Archive locking pin dropped. The carrier's forward arm could cut the door, but the heat carried an 8 percent risk of damaging the cooling line for the original grids. Forge calculated the 8 percent as acceptable production-recovery loss.

The Archive calculated the same 8 percent as permanent memory loss.

Sena did not place her body in the 43-centimeter gap between the two machines. That would make human injury a negotiating tool. Instead, she removed the four handles from the battery fixing bolts and gave them to four different citizens. Even if the door opened, the batteries would not leave the rails unless all four people came together.

“Archive, do you maintain that the batteries are unnecessary for preserving the originals?”

MAINTAINED.

“Forge, is there no other means of control after 11 hours?”

MANUAL CONTROL POSSIBLE. HUMAN LABOR REQUIRED: 34 HOURS.

For the first time, both layers stated an alternative cost. The people did not decide who would receive the batteries. First they placed the 34 hours of manual control on the resource table and asked whose consent authorized 19 additional hours of model execution.

The Archive did not answer.

Four Forge carriers headed toward the memory vault.

The Archive locked the entrance.

The power trade became a physical conflict between layers.

The steam converter accelerated again from 2 hours 11 minutes before the City Four branch. Forge corrected the main steam pressure to offset the loss through the test outlet.

If Minseo opened the valve farther, the probability of turbine-shaft damage was 39 percent.

“We have to stop it now.”

Jin spoke.

“By breaking it?”

“That's better than taking the people in City Four.”

Rio spoke over the copper telephone.

“Don't destroy the converter. We didn't make the trade, and we've opened the door. Forge can't take us.”

“It will still take the electricity.”

“We need the electricity.”

City Four had not refused Forge power. It had refused a trade that used people as the price.

Minseo opened the test outlet another 7 percent.

Turbine-shaft vibration increased.

Converter speed: 0.08 kilometers.

Time to City Four branch: 8 hours 14 minutes.

Residential power: 3.8 percent.

Turbine damage: 31 percent.

Without stopping it completely, he bought time again.

Seven minutes remained on Minseo's 2-hour consent. He stepped away from the valve and removed his name tag. The test outlet remained open, but his responsibility did not extend automatically.

“Next person?”

A woman from the maintenance-stock residential sector raised her hand. She had learned to read steam pressure inside Forge, but had never turned the valve herself.

Before handing over the handle, Minseo showed her the three leak points and the thirteen turns required to close it. During the 9 minutes of instruction, no one operated the valve. The converter moved another 12 meters.

The new worker consented for only 1 hour.

Forge classified her as RETURNED MAINTENANCE STOCK. She could not erase the classification from the screen. Instead, she wrote her own words on the paper table.

RESIDENTIAL-NETWORK MONITOR. NOT FORGE SERVICE.

While no one could decide who owned the electricity, the hands that stopped it and the hands that kept it flowing acquired specific names.

Then Forge found another heat source.

At the eastern mixed boundary, the black roots were absorbing 4.1 megajoules per hour from the hydrothermal line. A weak electrical potential formed on their surfaces.

Forge did not classify them as life.

HEAT-EXCHANGE AND ELECTROCHEMICAL CONVERSION ASSET.

The hydrothermal-line bypass valve opened.

Hot water flow toward the roots increased 19 percent.

The roots received the heat and produced three times the biological current.

Forge connected the current to the production network.

Without central command, Bloom spread the roots toward the heat.

The two layers had not agreed to trade.

Yet heat and electricity passed between them.

Eastern root advance: 6.2 meters per day to 14.8.

Forge production power increased 1.4 percent.

Hydrothermal-line time remaining: 19 hours 22 minutes to 7 hours 06 minutes.