Archive of Our Own

It had been three and a half years since the Determined Writer had founded the business venture of the Great Hellbound Railway; three and a quarter years since the first time the workers had sent their union leader Furnace Ancona to parlay with him and his board about work conditions; three since his partner the Gracile Agent had strongarmed him into making as much of the venture a worker's co-op as possible.

("Isn't it enough to have the best policies on worker safety and pay just as well as the other factories too?" the Determined Writer had said, back then.

The Gracile Agent had stared him down. "People have shed blood laying these tracks. They're the only reason we got as far as we have. We need to show our gratitude, not just say it.")

Two years before the present day, when the tracks got to Balmoral, a Scottish anarchist going by the name of September fascinated the Writer with his theories and analyses ("Is it no' odd that Frontispiece lass has the same habit o' squooshin' words the'gether as Master Pages? Erryone else asks who inspired who, but if they wis one and the same..."), and the Gracile Agent found an exceptionally long dumbwaiter.

The Gracile Agent came back down the dumbwaiter two days later, heavily injured but triumphant: she never explained what she'd done, but it was a success.

("They warned me about this. The sun reopened these wounds and rebroke my arm because I had to make a run for it." The Agent's breathing was labored with pain. "The light of the sun isn't happy with the way the Neath bends the concept of life and death."

"You're incredibly lucky you didn't die," the Writer said, squirting a stinging solution into a particularly deep slash. "You've been stabbed in the chest before. If that one had reopened...")

Eleven months ago, a Solicitor-Baroness explained to them that they had been laying track over the body of a living being of earth called the Creditor: something that the Masters of the Bazaar knew, but had never warned the Railway about.

The Gracile Agent's contacts supplied a mask-wearing intellectual by the name of January (who the Determined Writer appointed to the board as a cover story), who helped draw up a contract that acknowledged that the Creditor was sovereign of itself, and promised to use the Railway's own resources to protect this claim. From then on, the Railway rested on slabs and gravel that kept the track above the ground, and they hired an engineer to calculate the lowest number of piles that would need to be driven for stability. And the Determined Writer sold many precious things from his private collections and bought back the shares that had been given to the very first large London investors, so that the Creditor could be added as a major shareholder and paid dividends same as any other - though its own share would be given in souls and lacre, poured into the earth.

Six months ago, the Solicitor-Baroness pulled the Determined Writer and Furnace Ancona aside to say that, after seeing what Furnace did when imprisoned in Hillchanger Tower, the Creditor wished to have her hand in something like marriage: proposing that Furnace have her body turned into a city, and in exchange offering to help protect any such venture from anyone who would disturb it.

("It loves that she is such a small thing and yet her mind has an entire city inside of it," said the Solicitor-Baroness. "It loves that she can speak in more than one voice. It loves that she is so daring as to use the Discordance as a weapon. It wants to uplift her, to bring her alongside it, to see her dreams succeed."

"A proposal and a proposal," the Writer said, thoughtfully. "But is marriage not supposed to be a mutual arrangement? Furnace, do you actually think you can love something like that? I don't want you trapped in a relationship you can't satisfy."

"I don't think this is a bargain I can refuse," said Furnace. "I'm being offered protection from the Masters, from the Ministry, from Hell. Do you have any idea how valuable that is?")

Just under six months ago, the Determined Writer enlisted the Gracile Agent's help in researching the method to implant a diamond heart.

The research project touched upon a vast array of esoteric arts. The Gracile Agent roamed the dream-realms, trying to reach into the thoughts of lichens and corals. The Determined Writer took a ship to the distant island of Polythreme, where the land itself was alive. From these studies, when the Determined Writer began experimenting on anesthetized goldfish and dreamed-up birds, he was merely deeply frustrated instead of completely lost.

The Gracile Agent also took time away to study another esoteric art entirely, the Discordance. She learned sigils and spells that glittered with frost. Then one day an expedition found her wandering around the stones of the Hurlers with no conscious thoughts and no will of her own: she would do as she was asked, but no more. They told her to go home, and so she did. There, the Writer begged her to never do this again. When her spirit came back to her she confirmed that she wasn't going to do it again, but it wasn't because he asked - it was because "I didn't find the answer I needed".

Instead, a month ago, she proposed another trip by boat.

"Are you ready?" the Gracile Agent might one day ask.

"No, but let's do it anyway," the Determined Writer could answer.

A pane of glass this size, if carried in the hold of a ship, would shatter. The trick, then, would be to bring a moderately sized mirror, one that could be affixed to the wall of the captain's cabin, and then have someone else help pass another much larger mirror through the first.

The Determined Writer and Gracile Agent would take the mirror into Irem, then, and together -

Some uncertain time later, or earlier, the two might emerge carrying a woman in an oversized helmet, dressed in the tattered, discolored remains of a set of tracklayer's overalls.

Two weeks ago, the Solicitor-Baroness stared blankly at the Gracile Agent. "I'm sorry, did you say you have another one of her?"

The Determined Writer spun a pen around his fingers. "Your client will still be getting Furnace Ancona, as we promised. We just found another one. She's from a future that had left her to die, so they won't even miss her."

"From a future... you got someone out of Irem? How?"

The Determined Writer shrugged. "Long story."

"Well." The Solicitor-Baroness stood up with a huff. "All I can tell you is that the contract as written does not prohibit this sort of substitution. Whether it pleases the other party is your problem, and any consequences will be on your head."

The door slammed shut behind her.

The Gracile Agent smiled. "That's a yes, then."

All the Writer and the Agent told their own Furnace Ancona, the one who led the Tracklayers' Union, was that alternative arrangements had been made.

And yesterday the Writer and the Agent took the train far, far away from London, took the abandoned version of Furnace, and replaced her heart with a diamond, and made of her body a city.

Furnace Ancona woke up in a bed, which was odd because she didn't remember going to sleep. She certainly didn't recognize this tiny room with light outlining a door and window.

She pushed aside the blanket that had covered her, put bare feet to a surprisingly warm floor, and stood. A lever on the window opened shutters that allowed filtered light.

She browsed the shelves at the foot of her bed. They were mostly filled with the practical sturdy clothes she typically wore, but some unaccountable instinct made her push the usual ones aside and reach further in.

This was her mother's dress.

Furnace had always loved this dress, with the rose-vine embroidered all the way around the collar, complete with tiny thorns in the exact same shade of burgundy as the fabric itself.

But when she shook it out and held it up, she realized that something was wrong. It now had a day collar so tall that it consumed the neck, and the sleeves were so absurdly long that they dragged on the floor.

Furnace carefully folded it and put it back. Perhaps she'd have it refashioned so that the sleeves would be of a wearable length. Perhaps not.

She put on her combinations and elastic corset. She'd just wear overalls instead.

And finally, once she finished lacing her boots, she put on the enormous pot-shaped helmet she used to hide the fact that she had two faces around the back of her head where the hair should have been.

(Her extra faces weren't technically a secret, but she didn't like being reminded of what Cornelius had done to her. At least if she was in a helmet people were staring at her helmet, not her abnormality.)

When she left her room, she emerged into a courtyard she'd only ever seen in her dreams - save for the enormous crack down the center.

It looked like nothing so much as a wound, gray stone crumbling down into an uneven slash of red clay. An exposed pipe dribbled water. Instinctively she estimated length, width, depth, already calculating how much earth would need to be filled in and how much pavement would need to be redone. The water-main would have to be patched, too.

Even in a city that had been built all at once out of her dreams, there was still work to be done.

While the Gracile Agent had risked her life for the Liberation, and the Determined Writer had put both January and Furnace on the Railway Board and genuinely valued their opinions, the Writer had a great deal of conventional wealth and status. And January knew that having that kind of wealth and status always, always meant that one regularly did business with people who traded lives for money, and still slept at night. Even if his own operations were run fairly, the suppliers of Bessemer steel and crushed rock could wriggle out from under inspections, and one did not get a whole page in Slowcake's without trafficking in favors and bribes.

But he had an intellectual curiosity that she understood. If she gave him difficult translations, he would have to contemplate the context and meanings behind the messages. If she gave him partial accounts for him to theorize about the gaps in, he would construct that worldview and inhabit it, the better to figure out what was not said. If she gave him stories that could no longer be seen anywhere else because they had been burned, he would want to preserve the source he was getting them from.

She brought him rubbings from hieroglyphic accounts of the workers' strikes under Ramses III. And he spoke about theories of social technology advancing alongside physical, and wondering if simple strikebreaking techniques hadn't failed but instead had not yet been invented.

She found him fragmented stories of Jewish people being forcibly removed from place after place. In return, he shared his stories of working under God's Editors, utterly failing to find evidence of the Jews being evicted from Egypt, but seeing a single piece of proscribed material that he was quite certain was a contemporaneous account of the Babylonians hiring the wealthiest of the Israelites and killing the rest.

She spoke to him of how the Black Death, after all the suffering and screaming was done, put the three-quarters of the peasantry remaining in so much better of a bargaining position that working conditions became far more humane. The Writer did not believe it at first, and then when he was shown more evidence of the same it made him perceptibly force his breathing under control. He asked if that was where the idea of the Liberation of Night had come from. She said no. He asked where, then.

She spoke of the Tibetan dark retreat, where Buddhist monks spent time underground in total darkness for so long that they instead began seeing something beyond the skin of the world. Was what they saw hallucinatory? Or was it something more real than the light?

She spoke about theories of how and why sunlight killed those of the Neath. About Light as a vehicle for Law, about how the entire Neath was a collection of wonders because the sun was not there.

And finally she spoke of how the Masters of the Bazaar talked about a Great Chain of Being, one where even they were insignificant in the face of stars. And she spoke of taking down these stars.

January knew that teaching this way was manipulative. But everyone who went through conventional education had already been immersed in propaganda for the status quo since birth. They were in families affluent enough that they could go to grammar school and then college instead of going to work at a tender age, and even their "revolutionary" clubs almost never rebelled against anything of real substance (nobody ever heard of a student protest against the Royal Navy conquering a territory). Being manipulative against all that was only fair.

The Determined Writer was running medical training workshops. As Furnace was planning social services, the Writer had proposed training nurse-practitioners and scattering them throughout the city so they might activate as needed, and had some choice words on the topic of 'hysteria'.

Though Tracklayers often knew what to do with wounds and exposure, they still needed to know how to check if a child was growing quickly enough, and what illnesses were serious enough to need to transport someone with haste rather than just sending them on. So it was that a classroom full of prospects was watching a visiting lecturer speak on ear infections and the treatment thereof, while next door a midwife spoke about the feminine anatomy, in a third the Determined Writer himself held a lecture on germ theory, and in a fourth a One-eyed Veteran demonstrated the wrapping of plaster casts.

(Certainly the Determined Writer could have worked among the citizens himself. But this was a better use of his time and expertise; he was teaching the Tracklayers how to help themselves.)

At lunch that day, the Writer sat next to the One-eyed Veteran, and found out that while the Veteran did not know of Lister's acid or asepsis, he practiced painting wounds in turpentine and heating suturing needles in a flame.

"My ship kept both vodka and turpentine," the Veteran said. "So I alternated between them on different days for a couple weeks. Fewer of the wounds turned nasty when I used turpentine."

"That's an experiment!" The Writer leaned forwards, eyes sparkling. "With a control group, and an experimental group! If you have those records, you could publish a paper!"

"Why?" the Veteran said. "Seems like a lot of work."

"But - the fame - a medical discovery -"

"I don't want fame."

"If I could at least write about -"

"I can't stop you from writing whatever you want, but don't you dare hint that anything came from me. I intended for this city to be my peaceful retirement. I do not wish to be disturbed."

(The paper the Determined Writer published, months later, was met with shrugs. London's universities did not care about decreasing mortality rates, on the theory that the patient would come back to life eventually anyway.)

As Furnace wandered the city, she and she and she became progressively more unsettled. The bricks and the paving were the same exact dark gray, making it often impossible to tell where walkway ended and wall began. All the stairs were pitched too steeply for comfort. The architecture was given to vaults and arches, and where statues should have been there were stalagmites protruding from the floor.

A few courtyards were filled with running children and elderly folk at their embroidery, but so many of them weren't. She knew that the city just wasn't filled yet, that more people were going to move in, but it still felt eerie and unfinished.

She saw a pub called The Gripping Arm. The door was open, so Furnace wandered in.

It was fully stocked, but it was empty. Instead of the laughter and games and murals on the walls she'd once imagined, there was only gray stone.

Furnace found herself and herself and herself welling up with tears.

"Come on. We still have work to do," her right face said, but that face also wasn't the one sinking slowly to her knees.

Furnace was weeping, in an empty building in an empty courtyard in an empty neighborhood, wondering why her dreams had broken upon the shores of reality.

Presently, Furnace heard the clearing of a throat in the doorway.

"You know, if you don't want to be found, there are much better options," the Gracile Agent said. "There's plenty of empty rooms around here that have doors that can be locked."

"I was just looking around." Despite an attempt to sound casual, Furnace's voice was still thick with tears.

"Looking around? At the floor of an empty establishment? A likely story." The Agent sat down on the floor next to her. "Something is troubling you."

"This city is so close to being what I wanted. But everything is wrong."

"Hm?"

"Nobody else will ever notice, but... it's too tall and hard and brutal. The walkways and alleys are too narrow. The stairs keep making me trip forwards. There's places where every floor is twelve feet tall."

"Oh," the Agent said. "Well. We can deal with those things, right?"

Furnace sat up so that she could stare the Agent in the eyes. "You said you wouldn't need to turn me into the city anymore because you'd made arrangements. So be honest with me: what were the arrangements?"

"Well... the way it started, I figured that you deserved to live in the city you've been dreaming of all your life. So I looked for an alternative to sacrificing you."

"And the alternative was...?"

"Well, at first, I learned that there is a way to double the self. I wanted to do it to you so we'd have someone for the Creditor while yet preserving you, but then I realized there was no way you would ever agree to such a thing. Because it involves the Discordance."

Furnace flinched.

"Exactly." The Gracile Agent tipped her head back to rest against the bar. "So instead we found a road not traveled. A version of you who had been abandoned instead of saved at Hillchanger, whose hope had been crushed, who would never have achieved this dream if we hadn't intervened."

"You made a city," Furnace said, slowly, "out of a version of me whose spirit had been broken."

"...yes?"

"And you somehow didn't realize that a city made out of a broken person would be a broken city."

The Gracile Agent made a strangled noise. "I thought -"

"No, you didn't think! That's the entire problem! Why didn't you ask me what I wanted?"

"I couldn't just leave the Writer to kill you!"

Furnace's voice rose. "What? He wasn't going to kill me!"

"It might not count as true death, but it would be the death of the human part of you. I'd never be able to really talk with you again. Your thoughts would be measured in years, not seconds. And I couldn't bear the thought."

"..."

"I'm sorry."

Furnace stood. "I'm not the one you need to apologize to. You're going to help this city get better, and once its wounds have been salved we can discuss your feelings."

"Are you asking me to join the work crews with the bricks, or..."

"Actually - remember the thing you did to fix space around that one missing block? I found a fissure in the ground. I was thinking we were going to have to fill the entire thing, but if you can just knit it together, that'd be a lot easier."

"It's called the Red Science. Show me and I'll see what I can do."

The Determined Writer had always had a talent for languages - not just the Correspondence, but Latin, Khaganian, and now Neathy Sign Language. Manual language was being suppressed Above, oralists having succeeded in forcing schools for the deaf to teach nothing but lip-reading, but when those who lived in the backstreets needed to communicate underneath the noise of a screaming Storm-Threnody they used something surprisingly similar to what was described in the works of l'abbé de l'Épée. Neathy Sign Language was a legitimate and distinct language entirely unrelated to any other that the Writer had ever seen, and from its vocabulary the Writer deduced that its history stretched back to before London fell.

So the Writer and someone who only went by the name of April, a Revolutionary who had become deaf a few years ago, spent regular time in the backstreets of London, comrades-in-arms of a community of several hundred who had learned to live without sound.

(January corresponded regularly with institutes for the blind using a six-dot alphabet pushed into cardstock with blunt needles, but the Writer knew a relexification when he saw one.)

These people knew the Determined Writer's fungal poetry better than his grand operas, and did not recognize April at all. It had been nice to be around people who, instead of knowing the Writer as a Director on one of the greatest industrial projects of the decade, had initially mistaken the two's shared use of the raised fist as a married last name.

That was how it had started, at least. Ever since the plans for the Tracklayers' City had become serious, April had advocated for the establishment of a place for the deaf. The Writer was enthusiastic, and even before the city had cooled there was a neighborhood set aside for the purpose. But now that this was more than a hypothetical, the tenor of the interactions between the Writer and those who weren't his personal friends had shifted: the Writer was a philanthropist, not a peer.

The Cauliflower-eared Washerwoman who had first introduced the two to the community had no such issues. We're getting representation in the local government, right?

April smiled brightly. Of course! Same as any other community.

You and yours won't be holding elections, you're supposed to have collective meetings same as every other group, the Writer signed. And someone will need to interpret for you in the big hall.

Not a problem, the Washerwoman signed back. I'll be moving in next week.

The fundamental principle the City was built upon was this: everyone who lives here works. There were a certain number of required hours per week; more valuable jobs counted as multiple hours. Anyone who did not work could stay up to three days, but that was all.

(And maybe others would have come up with something else. But Furnace Ancona had started as a labor union leader, and she had to stem the absolute flood of people from London looking for the "free houses" somehow.)

Work shifts were, however, not assigned. There was simply a piece of paper you put your name onto pinned to a wall, and occasionally there was a note next to it begging for someone to please cover next Tuesday morning, and when you were done that day you had other people on your shift (or the next shift after, or occasionally someone from your neighborhood if you worked completely alone) initial the paper to say you did in fact show up. Occasional audits were performed by asking people working or living in buildings nearby, or random visits during the emptiest hours, to ensure honesty.

The City was almost two days away from London by train, and then another hourlong excursion on a dirt road down past that. This access road began at a small group of buildings that had spontaneously sprung up around a previously empty station (as is wont to happen when a railway puts a stop in the middle of nowhere). The stop and the resulting railway town were named after the former church that stood at the location, Burrow-Infra-Mump.

On the other side of the City, Moulin - also a relative hovel compared to the City, composed of a few dozen tin-roofed buildings - was occasionally visible in the distance, should shifting mists allow.

The frosts of the Hurlers sometimes crept this far Londonward, cold winds nipping at noses and fingers. Summers were merely less cold. And yet every dwelling in the city remained warm from some power within.

Water was obtained from a river another half an hour's walk north of the City. The city's sewage was cleaned up as well as was possible given the technology available and discharged well downriver into the same.

The City had been created with storehouses with food enough for the theoretical capacity of the city. In the meantime, with the population at a small fraction of its possible size, these provisions would hold out for quite a while longer, though they would need to figure out what to do for food sooner rather than later. In the meantime, the Writer found people who were willing to pay for alleged skeletons in wagonloads of Incorruptible Biscuits and Rubbery Lumps, and locals grew mushrooms from shredded newsprint and food waste compressed into paper bags.

Meanwhile, Furnace was working long hours in an Interim Infrastructure Office, because the list of things that were wrong with her city was interminable.

A number of buildings, especially on the Hellward end, were nothing but disorganized piles of bricks (yes, she already knew about that, cleanup was ongoing). A particular region had a twinned building, with two halls instead of one, and they didn't know what to do with the other half (that was a governance issue, not an infrastructure one). There was a proposal to replace several stalagmites with actual statues (why were they asking her). There had to be some sort of street sign system (come back once they had an actual specification). Someone wanted to survey how wide the pathways were (fine, whatever). Several buildings had doors that tried to open into alleyways only six inches wide (there were so many bigger problems).

At some point, Furnace told the next appointment to wait a moment, shut the door, and immediately burst into tears.

"We're burnt out," her left face said. "We need to go home."

"But what happens if there's an emergency?" Furnace asked.

"Get the Director to cover," her right face said, referring to the Determined Writer.

If the Writer wasn't checked on regularly, he'd probably start trying to make non-infrastructure decisions that overstepped the position, but at least he'd prevent the place from burning down. She could drop in on the way home.

Furnace swallowed herself and walked past the line, holding her shoulders so that her helmet shielded her from dark looks. She couldn't help them in this state anyway.

The Determined Writer greeted Furnace at his door. "Furnace! What brings you? Did work let you out early?"

"I, I need -" Furnace stuttered and failed.

The Writer and Agent shared a surprisingly modest room, where a folding screen was all that separated the "sitting room" from the "bedroom". When the Writer steered her into a chair, it was in front of a table that simultaneously served as tea, dining, and desk. "What do you need? I can get you tea."

"I can't do this," Furnace's left face said.

The Writer put a hand on Furnace's shoulder. Furnace flinched. The Writer immediately withdrew. "Did something bad happen?" the Writer said, softly.

"No!" Furnace said. "Nothing bad happened. I just spent so much time pushing myself - 'just a little more, once I've made our city my job will be done.' Then I find out that even now there's still so much to do, and, and..."

The Writer got up and retrieved a kettle from a shelf. He sloshed it to check if there was still water inside. "No, it makes sense. If you were burning yourself out to the last stub to get everyone here, of course you'd be exhausted now. So. Rest. Let everyone else help."

"I'm supposed to be the strongest person everyone knows. If I can't be strong now, what does that make me?"

The Writer opened a fuel can; lit it; put a wire cage around it. Then he put the kettle on top. "Did you know that if you hit diamonds in a specific way, they shatter?"

"Is that what you do in your lab? Smash perfectly good diamonds?"

"Actually, the dust makes an excellent polishing compound. But that's beside the point. Even if something breaks you - that doesn't make you any less of a diamond, any less strong. It just means that something got to you in exactly the right place."

A chuckle came from Furnace's left face. "Or, in this case, exactly the wrong place."

"Still, it's clear that what you're doing right now isn't for you. Someone else should be doing it."

"Well, nobody else has volunteered."

"Likely as not they don't realize the job needs to be done because you're doing all of it right now." The kettle whistled. "Right, the tea."

He smothered the canned flame with its lid, and into a teapot he measured out something that no Tracklayer could ever afford ("when you develop expensive tastes, then unfortunately that means you have expensive tastes"). He left her to watch the leaves unfold, while he took clothes behind the screen and changed there.

He returned to pour them two mugs of tea, and slipped his into a sewn cozy so he could take it with him. "Well! I'm off to Infrastructure. Leave the teapot, I'll take care of it." The Writer strolled out the door.

Furnace sat there and drank the expensive tea. She thought, longingly, about how much simpler things were back when she only dreamed of a city. Now that she had it, she had to protect and foster it. But how?

Through some sort of month-themed network that January and the Gracile Agent had access to, the City was receiving many like-minded workers with specialized knowledge that would be needed as the city grew. (A few were even immigrating from the Surface.) Even now, her Tracklayers were apprenticing in skills she'd barely even known existed.

But every time she heard of a new profession, Furnace was reminded of how much she didn't know. It made her perpetually afraid that a problem nobody noticed would bring the city down.

The Gracile Agent returned by Railway sleeper car, "just to make sure my tools don't unravel".

(The Agent had also told Furnace that she couldn't fix the leaking water main. It took several pulled strings and not a little grumbling about favoritism to get the pipe replaced. But it was done in time.)

So it was two mornings later that the Gracile Agent opened a briefcase next to the wound in the ground, setting out a number of strange tools. The Agent climbed into the hole in the ground and began to inscribe incomplete Correspondence sigils on the sides.

The first person to pass by stopped and stared. And then a second stopped and stared. By the time the Agent was done, a small crowd had amassed. She climbed out of the hole to general applause - but then she shouted "What happens next is too dangerous to be near! Get everyone out!"

Furnace - roused by the loudness of the voice - emerged from her doorway, and helped herd others away from the site. Eventually, the only ones left were Furnace and the Agent herself. Furnace braced herself on the doorway: she had an idea what was going to happen next.

The Agent laid prone on the ground, only her head and shoulders over the edge, and right underneath her finished a Correspondence sigil with the stroke of a stylus. It began to smolder. She finished the sigil directly across with a drawing-compass, and that one smoked too.

The Agent took something that looked like a yardstick, pushed one end into one sigil, and planted the other end in the other sigil. And she pulled.

Even braced against it, the sensation of space collapsing was like being yanked forwards by the bellybutton.

Stroke by stroke, the Agent finished another pair of sigils and pulled them together with main force. By the third set, the Agent was sweating and groaning. So Furnace took her leave, crawling to a safe range before popping up to a brisk walk.

(The walkways were still too narrow. The stairs were still too steep. She needed to fix it. She needed to fix it.)

Meanwhile, in another local office, the Determined Writer was scribbling in a notebook as Cornelius watched.

Cornelius was a wiry man who had worked alongside Furnace as leaders of the Tracklayer's Union, once, on a different railroad. Then Cornelius had spoken words of ice, words that scarred them both and killed Cornelius. The Neath's tenuous relationship with death meant that Cornelius came back to life - but something about the injury Cornelius had suffered was permanent. He came back with every inch of his skin bandaged. These bandages remained indefinitely, and Cornelius moved to desk work.

Even before he died, Cornelius believed that humans deserved jobs better than tracklaying, and so he drew up plans for elephants that leveled gravel and mammoths that laid rail ties. Upon meeting him, the Determined Writer's curiosity had been piqued by the intellectual puzzles of designing such beasts, and so he'd come up with birds that pecked spikes into the ground and brush-cutting beavers. Now that there was an actual city, though, a lot of them had to be retrofitted or replaced for more appropriate roles.

(Furnace thought the whole thing was a frivolous distraction from the real work that needed to be done. January found it distasteful: creating more subservient creatures merely reinforced the false and damaging notion of there being a "natural order of things" where some beings were superior to others.)

This was when Furnace burst in the door. "You," she said, pointing to the Writer. "Your partner is doing difficult work and will need care and rest when she is done. Go where the three tallest counterclockwise spires are and follow the silver wall, then take a right turn."

The Writer sprang up, snapping his notebook shut and giving it to Cornelius. "On it."

The Writer let the door swing shut behind him. This left Cornelius and Furnace alone together in awkward silence.

Cornelius had never been able to use a chair properly - he always had an arm thrown over the back of the chair or folded a knee up to hug it or hooked his foot around the nearest table leg or what-have-you. Here, he was sitting on his chair backwards, backrest against his chest.

"I should go," Furnace said, turning -

"Can we talk?" Cornelius asked.

Furnace narrowed her eyes. She had time, but she and she and she weren't going to just sit down and let Cornelius set the pace of the conversation. So she stood near the door, hands on her hips. "Say your piece."

"I'm sorry for making you the way you are now. If you can forgive me -"

"- First her, now you, I don't have time for this. This city is broken, I have to fix it, and instead of helping everyone keeps using me as a confessional!"

Cornelius stood, slamming a palm on the table next to him. "You think I'm not working to fix things?"

"What?"

"The Director and I are modifying the grade-levelers -"

"Then why are you here!?" Furnace's voice was shrill. "Go do that!"

Cornelius left the office.

A few minutes later, there was a polite knock on the door. But before Furnace moved, whoever it was opened the door themselves.

A man in a strange red coat told her: "You need a break."

Furnace shook her head. "I can't afford to take a break. Not with everything that's been going on -"

"You need a break." The man snapped his fingers -

All Furnace could see through the visor of her enormous pot helmet was sumptuous red wallpaper, and two overstuffed armchairs with a round mahogany table between them. Too rich for her tastes. "What did you just do!?"

"I don't usually introduce myself with this name, but the others told me you would react better this way. So." The man extended his hand. "May of the Calendar Council, at your service."

(So that was what January's month-themed network was called.)

Furnace laughed helplessly, but took it. "Kidnapping me is a terrible greeting."

"I've seen worse," May said. "I'm not going to tell you who asked me to bring you here, but I can say there was more than one of them. There are people who really care about you, you know."

"Where's 'here'?"

"This room actually has a long-term lease to a certain determined writer of our mutual acquaintance."

That wasn't the answer she wanted, but fine. "Is he one of the ones who told you to do this?"

May winked. "He lives in the spires of the Bazaar. He won't miss this room. I'm pretty sure he just keeps the lease for sentimental purposes."

"So... uh... what am I supposed to do here?

"I'll have someone send up a meal, and a jigsaw puzzle to keep your hands busy."

Jigsaw puzzles! The very idea! "If you can find any books about urban planning -"

"No," May said immediately. "This is supposed to be a rest for you. But - actually, you know what, I can get you watercolors."

"Fine. And you said something about a meal?"

"Anything you like," May said.

Furnace decided to test the 'anything' in that statement. "Polenta with fontina."

To her surprise, May just nodded. "I'll see what they can do."

"Anything else you'd like to tell me about these arrangements you've so kindly made for me?"

"I'll warn you in advance," May said. "Bars are bolted over the windows and the door locks from the outside. Security reasons and all that."

May disappeared.

...Bars on the windows.

Furnace took off her helmet, let it slip to the floor, and actually looked around the room. Brass fittings, red velvet, the gaslights hidden behind fine mesh so as to prevent poking anything through.

This was the Royal Bethlehem Hotel and insane asylum, where a merry gentleman in a red coat with brass buttons took those whose reason had entirely deserted them.

She laid down on the floor and laughed and laughed until tears came out of her eyes.

She was officially mad.

The Gracile Agent collapsed to the floor as the work was completed.

The Determined Writer had jogged the whole way here. "Hey. Let’s get you to a bed now."

"Hang on -" The Agent shot up and began putting the tools back in her briefcase. "I can't leave these lying around."

When this was done the Writer helped the Agent stagger upright, hauling one of her limp arms over his shoulder.

"Right. Home, bed, tea," the Writer said, "and if the cafeteria has soup this early in the day I'll get you some of that too."

"Thanks," the Agent said, weakly. "Glad to have you."

"Same," said the Writer.

The Writer helped the Agent home, and past the folding screen in their room, into the part of it that had been sectioned off for their beds.

(There were two single beds. They did not have that kind of relationship.)

The Agent dozed restlessly the first night, as the Writer kept watch to interrupt her nightmares.

The Writer had a shift in Care, but sent word that he'd need the next day off to tend to his partner. On this day the Agent did light paperwork, read books, and took naps to sleep off most of the wounds and the nightmares. The Writer fed her mushroom soup.

By the next day, though, the Gracile Agent was more than eager to get back to work. The Writer had long since established an understanding with her that so long as her wounds weren't bleeding, any bones that were broken had healed, and she wasn't waking up screaming, she could go back to doing... whatever it was she did. Considering that the Agent could fit through basement windows and down airshafts, it wasn't possible to keep her much longer anyway.

The Gracile Agent announced her intention to find another fissure to close the same way, despite knowing full well that doing so would shatter her like this again.

The Determined Writer sighed. "In two days, please. So your recovery aligns with my next day off."

"Spoilsport," the Agent said, but in the meantime she did what passed for light duty by her standards: climbing up onto roofs to find places to secure ropes and harnesses, which would allow people with more ordinary strength to haul each other up high enough to paint tall walls.

On the way back from a task, the Gracile Agent passed Large Governance - the place where representatives of each community convened to ratify the decisions that would shape the city. It was buried halfway underground, with housing and a cafeteria built on top, and deliberately not called Central anything.

The closest door had a lock which was really only a suggestion; one quick jiggle and the Agent was in.

Not that there was much to steal here. The ordinary chairs and tables were arranged in a half-circle around, not a lectern, but a singular blue flame.

The flame was the size of her hand. It sat in a bowl-shaped depression at the top of a pedestal that grew directly from the floor, the same dark gray rock as the city itself. The bowl had an inscription on it, in a language she recognized but couldn't read; she memorized it for later.

She reached a single fingertip towards the flame, curiously; it bent towards her, and -

joy sorrow kindness thirst eagerness growth wish hunger ambition need hope gratitude desire wonder fear realization protectiveness

The Gracile Agent was flat on her back, breathing heavily. She had been thrown away from the flame, both shoulders somehow exactly caught by the legs of two adjacent tables so her head passed neatly between them unscathed.

What she had touched was a mind far, far larger than hers, a mind that knew every need and thought every thought and cared infinitely more than any person ever could.

That was the mind of the entire city.

Furnace paced the length of her room at the Royal Bethlehem back and forth. How exactly did one go about becoming less insane?

A knock on her door, and when she opened it there was someone with a cart, with a covered tray on top. "Room service," they said - but Furnace did not miss the way the cart fit precisely across the doorframe so she wouldn't be able to just push past.

She retrieved the food and the watercolor supplies. "Is there something I need to do here?"

"What do you mean by do?"

"How do I leave?"

"Oh, I don't decide that," said the servant. "That's up to the Manager. Do you need anything else in the meantime?"

"Do I get to have visitors?"

"The Manager gets to choose."

Furnace sighed. "No further questions."

"Have a nice day!"

Furnace closed the door and uncovered her dish.

It certainly looked like polenta. Furnace dipped her spoon in: and it tasted like polenta too.

Was it real?

(Did that matter?)

Furnace savored it slowly.

January burst into Cornelius' office. "You told the Manager to put Furnace in the Beth."

Cornelius looked up slowly. "...Yeah?"

January scowled. "Why didn't you send her to Care?"

"Because I don't trust them with Furnace because she's Furnace. You put her in with them, they're still forming their procedures, she could tell them to do something and they'd just do it."

"And how is that a bad thing?"

"Because then it wouldn't be a break for her, it'd be a weird sort of surprise inspection."

"The mad deserve the ability to help determine their treatment."

"They don't know what they should have because they're mad. That's the point."

January crossed her arms. "There are different kinds of madness, almost none of them are dangerous to others, and many of them have at least periods of lucidity. And modern medicine often gives them more: the Writer has been telling me about Dr. Schlomo's approach to neurasthenias and the therapeutic possibilities of lithium salts."

Cornelius said nothing.

January huffed, and turned away. "I'm telling her it's your fault."

"Fine."

(What January didn't say was "I could have kept an eye on her myself".)

The Gracile Agent told the Determined Writer what she'd witnessed in Large Governance, of course.

"Your first impression was right. The inscription on the bowl is the ancient cuneiform of the First City, and it means roughly 'This is where the city's heart can be found'." The Writer put a hand on the Agent's knee. "Are you quite sure you want to investigate further?"

(The question of whether it was a good idea was never asked. By this point, both knew that even if the answer was no, that wouldn't stop either of them.)

"Do you have any knowledge that would be helpful?" the Agent asked.

"...I think there might be a relevant book in my private library."

The book was called The Mind's Ascent, and called for a rigorous and extensive program to increase the capacity of one's mind.

"I've already done half of this, and I know how to do the rest," the Agent observed. "Go back to the city. I need to prepare some things."

A knock, and May opened the door to the room Furnace was staying in. "You have a guest."

Furnace straightened up from where she'd been slumped over the table as January entered, carrying a small tray with teapot and cups.

"Ring up when you're finished with whatever you're doing, Janus," May said.

"Thank you," January replied, and May shut the door.

January put the tea tray down. "I brought something to drink. Jasmine, if that's all right with you."

"Rather more posh than my usual, but fine," Furnace said.

January poured tea for both of them, then paused. "If I take off my mask, can you promise that you won't reveal what I look like?"

Furnace gestured to her extra faces and distinct lack of helmet. "As you have likely observed, I am already at a disadvantage here."

January removed her mask, and took a sip of her tea. She was far older than Furnace had expected. "How are you feeling?"

"Bored," Furnace said. "Worried about how things are going in the City. Wondering how I got here."

"It was Cornelius who told May to put you in here." January's voice came out as if pressurized. "If I had known you were in this state I would have forcibly removed you from work and gotten Care to monitor you, but I absolutely do not support May not letting you leave."

"He said that more than one person told him to take me," Furnace said. "Not surprised one of them was Cornelius, though. I... may have had a breakdown in his presence."

"What sort of breakdown?"

Pain clouded Furnace's faces. Simultaneously, her left face said "Everything is wrong" and her right face said "I need to do better".

Furnace put a hand over each of her other mouths and tried again. "I have dreamed of a City for as long as I can remember. But when I look at what it is now, everything is wrong. It's too close together, wounded, incomplete, broken."

January took a sip. "You've been working in Infrastructure. Why haven't you gone anywhere else?"

"Infrastructure is where help is most desperately needed, because of the state of it all."

"And you haven't even taken a day to look at what anyone else has accomplished?"

"What do you mean?"

"The city's architecture may be off, certainly, but what about the social structures? We're still in the earliest stages, certainly, but - the Director has been training the Care students to gender equality. The Dark Futures Collective are already placing their first orphans with foster families, so the City will never have an orphanage that could abuse its children. The Beautification Committee has been painting the walls, and they decided on their own - without Infrastructure - to extend the murals down to the ground to create a visible edge between wall and floor. Two dozen people came on the train to move into the Deaf quarter a few days ago, and the residents there held their first community meeting yesterday. The bricks may be broken, but the institutions you have envisioned - they are alive."

Furnace fell forwards into January, who caught her in a hug as she shuddered with sobs.

"Obviously, there is always more to be done. But do not lose sight of what you have accomplished."

("So what were you doing in there?" May asked, later.

"Just making sure she'll live," January said.)

Over the next day May asked Furnace what she wanted, and then denied all of it. No, she couldn't leave. No, she couldn't write a letter. No, she couldn't go downstairs and meet anyone else. No, she couldn't see the roof. No, she couldn't go for a walk.

She needed to rest from burnout, and didn't that take a few days? he asked her. She should try to not think about it.

Furnace ordered a whole raw squid with her dinner, took out the ink-sac, and used the back end of one of the paintbrushes as a dip pen. The ink was gone before she woke up the next morning.

"This kind of situation would drive someone mad who wasn't already," Furnace said to the servant who brought her breakfast. She got no response.

"Hey! Are you listening to me?" Furnace waved a hand in front of the servant's face.

The servant pointed to her ear, then pantomimed an "X" and shook her head.

This servant couldn't hear.

But Furnace had learned to fingerspell, since she wanted to be able to communicate with everyone in her city, and that included the deaf community that was moving in. She had to take a moment to remember how, but after running through part of the alphabet everything else came to her. T-E-L-L A-P-R-I-L, she signed, and ran to the table and picked out one of her watercolor paintings of the City to hand to the servant.

The servant looked wide-eyed at her and nodded. Y-E-S, the servant signed. Furnace frantically nodded back. They had... communicated? Probably. Hopefully.

After breakfast, Furnace opened the window to a blast of smoky air and stared out at the glittering of London below.

Someone ran up to April, holding a piece of paper.

A woman at the Royal Beth with three faces gave this to my friend, the messenger signed, and then fingerspelled "Tell April".

April looked at the paper. It was a watercolor that recognizably depicted the City, and between that and the faces...

Oh.

Oh no.

Thank you, April signed back. This is disturbing news I am glad to receive.

Are you going to do something about this? the messenger asked.

April nodded. I will.

Upon receiving an urgent summons the Writer took a fast train down to Moloch Street, and looked around blinking in the smoke until he recognized someone waving frantically.

Furnace is being kept in the Beth, April signed.

I know, the Writer said, running up to her. What's wrong with that?

What's wrong with that!? April's face was scrunched up with the strongest anger she could convey. Are you even seeing what you're saying!?

I've been there before, it's not that bad -

April threw a fist at the side of the Writer's head. The Writer swung out of the way, of course, but the meaning was clear.

Please, April signed. She would not be asking for a rescue if she wanted to be there.

The Writer thought for an uncomfortably long moment. Do you know where she's being kept?

April shook her head.

I have a room in the Beth, so I have a valid reason to get in and snoop around. Okay, give me an hour. I'll go pack a bag and ask for my room back. You, get your contacts to find you a way in.

The Gracile Agent - following one of the many images presented to her by the blue flame - took an even less visible door behind Large Governance; it led to a spiral of stone steps that led further and further down.

At the very bottom was a patch of dirt.

The Gracile Agent laid down, and slowly began to expand her mind.

It was a terribly slow process. Twice, she needed to go upstairs so that she could bathe and eat an enormous meal: for it was important that she remembered to take care of her physical body, so that she would not waste away to nothing at the bottom of that shaft.

The third time, there was the pelting of feet down the staircase and someone knelt down to gently shake her.

"There's an emergency," he said.

"A wha -" The Agent struggled to put her mind back inside her skull. "How emergency is the emergency?"

"They're holding Furnace at the Royal Beth."

The Agent was suddenly wide awake. "I need a mirror."

Fifty-seven minutes later, the Determined Writer - carrying a carpetbag filled with pillows to bulk it up - was strolling in the front door of the Beth.

The Manager of the Royal Bethlehem met him there, of course. "Good evening! What brings you here?"

The Determined Writer spun a room key around his fingers. "I'd like to move back in."

"Wh - of course, we'll need a few minutes to clear the room out."

Oh, that was suspicious. The Writer cut a corner and started up the stairs. "Why would you need a few minutes? Isn't it my room that I have exclusive use of?"

The Manager was hopping backwards to keep in front of him, now. "Well - housekeeping -"

"I can go in while housekeeping is still there, right? I don't see the issue."

The Writer pushed away a still protesting Manager and started taking the stairs two at a time.

Furnace was sitting at the table when, without asking permission, a hand grabbed her shoulder from behind. Furnace immediately jabbed that elbow backwards -

as there was a snap and the world spun about them -

Furnace was no longer sitting on a chair, and so immediately fell backwards onto her rear. Then she pitched forwards briefly, disoriented by not having her helmet on, and -

"Can anyone tell me what is going on?" Furnace's right face yelled, before she could make up her mind as to whether or not to ask the question.

"Thank God, finally someone else with their wits," said a woman in a nightgown with dark circles around her eyes. "My husband told the police I was insane so they put me here -"

Furnace pushed her away. "I need to get out."

"Why is my room like this?" the Writer said, when the Manager caught up to him.

"Well - I did say that housekeeping needed to - "

"You were keeping another guest in my room."

"You haven't used it for four years! So I thought that when you asked me -"

"The lease has my name on it. Get out."

At this point, May - no, he was the Manager here - materialized near Furnace, and extended his hand -

- and, seeing a waistcoat in red and gold, Furnace abruptly remembered why she was there, and her world contracted down to a single point of fury.

"Why are you keeping me here?" Furnace demanded.

The Manager said, "I haven't been keeping you here, I've been keeping you somewhere restful and free from responsibility so you can get better."

"You mean this part of the Beth isn't to help people get better."

The Manager didn't say anything, but that was in itself an answer.

"What is here for, then?"

"People who the Constables pay me very, very handsomely to keep. They cannot be allowed to escape because they are too dangerous, but they are also dangerous to themselves so they can't be kept in the usual conditions."

"So you're running a prison," and here Furnace jabbed a finger forwards and secretly formed her other hand into a fist, "and you have the nerve to call yourself a Revolutionary? What are you even contributing?"

"Expertise," the Manager said. "Nobody else on the Council knows what I know and can do what I do. I am the only one who can contact -"

Furnace punched the Manager in the stomach.

This is when April came bursting in one of the back doors. April shouted something strangled that sounded enough like "Go!" that Furnace ran to the open door, where she recognized and threw herself towards the deaf servant she'd previously asked for help.

The servant took Furnace's hand, and they took off running down a maze of servant's passages. Out of the corner of an eye Furnace noticed a woman in a nightgown following them. The servant quietly eased open a door to the outside, where the Gracile Agent had a carriage ready and the other woman slipped away into the night.

On the train back out of London, Furnace shared her compartment with January and the Determined Writer (who had returned her helmet). The Writer was tinkering with a machine. January was proofreading a pamphlet written in the bump-language of the blind without looking at it, occasionally using raised stamps to mark the margins.

"...I've been in the Beth, you know," the Determined Writer said, suddenly.

"Really?" Furnace said.

"Among academics there's no shame in having the occasional interlude in red and gold," the Writer said. "The Correspondence eats away at your ability to tell what is and isn't real."

Furnace smiled lopsidedly. "Does that make me an academic? Should I be teaching? I can see it now. Tracklaying 102, how to judge whether you should climb into a ravine to retrieve your tools or just suck it up and tell your boss you're a miserable failure who needs new ones.”

Suddenly January was very serious. "Director. Are you the other one who called up the Manager?"

The Determined Writer fidgeted. "Um... well..."

"Because not everyone has an experience as positive as yours," January said. "There's a separate ward for Correspondence-related issues. You've probably never seen general population."

Furnace said, "I was locked in my - your - room the entire time. I had nothing to do and no way out."

The Writer looked horrified.

"We can discuss this later," January said. Then she put a hand on Furnace's shoulder. "You've just had a severe shock. You don't need to talk about it right now. Let's focus on getting you feeling better first."

A few days later, April was sitting across from the Writer in his office. So, about the Beth.

The Writer signed, What about?

It is claimed that an asylum is used to keep people who can't live in society. But it can end up as a place to tuck away abuse victims, people inconvenient to the powerful, and - perhaps most alarming for you - children who grew up without a language. That's why Phoebe works there. To help find these people.

The Writer's eyes widened. The deaf have their own Revolutionaries.

And we would never have known if I hadn't lost my hearing. Perhaps this is an argument for more outreach. Are there comparable folk among the Rubberies? Are there liberatory cats?

Perhaps there should be, if there aren't already.

Back to the subject. April looked quite serious. Do you not understand what you have demonstrated?

What I have...

April leaned forwards, directly into the Writer's personal space, scowling. If you did this while Furnace was proposing something that you disagreed with, you would be using the Beth as a way to get rid of her to make a vote go the way you wanted it to. That is political imprisonment.

The Writer looked aghast.

Never. Do. This. Again. April was practically signing directly into the Writer's face. Or I will personally destroy you.

For at least the first few days, Care decreed that Furnace was not to work; they told her they'd put someone in her office to record any non-urgent requests until she got back, and asked her who she appointed for the urgent ones. She told them she couldn't do that work anymore.

It was requested that at least for the moment, Furnace was to stay somewhere Care could monitor. She flinched until it was clarified that it was an ordinary courtyard that happened to mostly house Care staff, and was intended to keep her from just holing up in a room and never coming out again.

January had her meet with a group of others who had endured traumas of their own. Those who grew up under parents who had brought the war home with them. Those who had been arrested for no fault of their own. Those who had been gravely injured, betrayed, rendered helpless: and now, Furnace supposed, she counted too.

She automatically found herself going into social mode when the others spoke, offering heartening words while listening to people pouring their feelings out.

Then things got to her, and she just couldn't get the words out. Not as herself, anyway. So her other faces stepped in.

Her left face spoke of having been kidnapped to the Beth, and her right face spoke of everything wrong in the city feeling like her own personal failure, and she and she and she wept.

It initially startled others, to see her this vulnerable, but then she could see them thinking:

If the legendary Furnace Ancona struggles so much too, then maybe - just maybe - feeling like this does not make me uniquely bad.

Strangely, this encouraged her. Being a role model gave her pain a purpose. Facing it didn't just help her heal. It helped others too.

"So what's between you and Cornelius?" the Writer asked.

Furnace hunched forwards and buried her face in her hands. "Please don't make me talk to him again. I can't do it."

"She doesn't want there to be anything between her and Cornelius. She's done with that part of her life," said her back left face. "If you talk to him, make that clear."

"Well, she's obviously not done, otherwise she wouldn't be so sore about it," said her back right face. "But nothing he could say could ever make up for what he's done."

They had her go out into the community for several hours at a time, with someone supervising. For the moment she would go back to Care in the evenings for talking groups, and art, and sometimes gentle exercise. But after what had happened, it was critical that she not feel isolated or trapped.

Furnace spent a day with April and the Writer in the Deaf quarter, their hands flying as the Writer translated for Furnace. And she learned a few more of the signs for such things as "thank you", "railway", and "liberation".

Furnace spent a day helping paint bright walls, complete with needing to get paint cleaned off her helmet at the end of the afternoon.

Furnace spent a morning helping with laundry among some laughing washerwomen, where skeletal crocodiles agitated the clothing in a soapy pool and the clotheslines were on pulleys for easier access; and an afternoon helping in a cafeteria, where former waitstaff were freed by the cooks instead serving food in large lidded containers kept warm over a steam-table, where everyone filled their own bowls and locals took shifts washing the dishes.

Furnace spent a day helping at a school and daycare, where she listened as children read books to her and gave an impromptu civics lesson to a cadre of teenage girls.

Certainly Furnace's talents were better spent elsewhere. But according to Care she needed to see the City alive, where the people were, so she had hope to hold onto.

The day came when the Gracile Agent went down the spiraling steps, drank deeply from a flask, and knew - truly knew - the heart of the City.

The City could see she was trying to help, and it acknowledged that, but so too did it warn her:

You have a great deal of skill as a mage and a scientist, to make it here without losing your mind. Don't misuse it.

And it told her:

Your partner has a snake's tongue, and that makes him one of the very few true dangers this city cannot be protected from. He promised me that he would defend the city's values, but you must hold him to his word.

And it told her:

Your talents and what people tell me they need do not mesh. I do not know what you can do here. You will have to find your own way.

And it told her:

Be gentle with little Furnace. She is so very hard on herself.

Once Care appeared satisfied that Furnace wouldn't do anything reckless, they had someone escort her back home.

In the courtyard, she saw what was still a streak of red clay in between the cobbles. But it looked like a scar, now, not a wound.

She realized she hadn't been here since it had been fixed.

But once she entered the corridors that led to her room, it reminded her of nights of hurt and despair.

"I can't live here anymore," she told the person who was with her. So they borrowed a carpetbag for her few sentimental belongings, trinkets from shelves and drawers. Furnace put most of her clothes back in the communal closet, though she kept a few favorites and the facsimile dress, and switched out the bedsheets for fresh new ones for the next inhabitant.

She removed her nameplate and signed out of all the chore lists, then went to the neighborhood census office and told them she was moving.

"Where are you going?" the census worker asked her.

"Just put my forwarding address as the Tracklayer's Office."

"Where are you going, though?"

Furnace shrugged. "If I figure that out I'll let you know."

Later, after poring over maps at another census office, she eventually decided on a room that opened straight onto a courtyard. She wanted to be able to step directly from her door into a place where people gathered. A place that was alive.

Not all of the City was broken. But it took a direct request from someone who wanted to show it off for Furnace to see that something had gone right.

In its wisdom, the City supplied areas and equipment dedicated to water filtration, sewage treatment, and trash disposal: and had considered the safety of the workers in every detail. Machine rooms came with mechanisms where a worker going in would lock the door closed and the equipment off until they were finished, to ensure that no entrapment could occur. All rooms were well-ventilated. Every walkway had a railing, and separate tie-in points were provided for equipment and ropes so that the railings would not be misused. Spacious rooms were provided for storage of safety equipment, complete with racks and shelves and personal lockers. Tanks large enough to fall into always had escape hatches or ladders.

Finally, they showed her that the Determined Writer had, as usual, put his own hand in things. The water treatment plant had an extra room set aside specifically to add future advances in technology, and here one was: water chlorination, to completely eliminate any possibility of waterborne diseases like typhoid and cholera.

And for all the time Furnace had spent lamenting the state of the city, all these systems were built precisely to her vision, and when she saw it all working she spent the entire day beaming with joy.

Once Furnace had regained a measure of faith and determination, she began to ease herself back into political management, as it was the topic she was more suited for than any other. Today, the Gracile Agent followed along as Furnace explained how everything worked.

Anything that could be done locally was done locally. Furnace's city maintained a strong cultural sense of "if it needs doing and you know how to do it, just do it yourself". Supplies for many things were stocked in open warehouses, and all you had to do was sign them out with an explanation of what you were using them for. Often what was sent upwards was ledgers instead of proposals, documenting what was already being used and done.

Meetings were not to majority vote, but instead to consensus: a procedure that would be surprisingly familiar to attendees of a Railway Board meeting. Nobody necessarily had to be ecstatic, but discussions went until things were acceptable to all.

Furnace showed the Agent her own courtyard's meeting, the people in a handful of buildings surrounding a broad terrace coming together to discuss both local issues and things on bulletins from higher committees.

"So," Furnace said, standing on a bench to be above the crowd of about forty people. "Everyone here?"

(The moment Furnace moved in, everyone decided that she was their meeting leader. She went along with it.)

"Emmie's sick today," someone said. "So I'm here for two."

"Tell her I hope she gets well soon," Furnace said. "Anyone else?"

People glanced around, and concluded that everyone else they knew was here, and a general assent wafted from the crowd.

"So." Furnace was reading from a paper that was posted to every courtyard. "First proposal is for water meters at the courtyard level, so as to be able to compare against the output of the filtration plant. They want to make sure water isn't being lost to cracks in the ground or what-have-you. Comments?"

"Meters are a step to charging us for water!" someone shouted. "Absolutely not!"

"This city was literally just built, I don't see why we need a water audit."

"Can't we just hire rats to check the pipes?"

"They'd drown, of course."

"Give them little air tanks!"

General laughter.

An older voice cut in. "Don't see why it's necessary. If water treatment capacity or soil settling or something becomes a problem then we can check, but without any clear problems I don't see the need." Others murmured agreement.

Furnace looked around to make sure the discussion was finished. "All right, everyone. Proposal on vote is whether to add courtyard water meters. Hands up, open for yes, closed for no."

About half of people's hands went up. Most hands that did were closed. Some started open; a few of those people looked around and then pulled their hands back down.

"No majority and certainly no consensus," Furnace said to the notetaker, who scribbled that down.

(A consensus would have been if nobody had put up fists, meaning everyone was agree or neutral.)

"Next, a request for comment. Someone has proposed adding tool lending to the libraries, so you can borrow a hammer same as you would borrow a book. What tools do you think should be included?"

Discussion occurred. Eventually the notetaker wrote down the top proposals people seemed to cluster around.

"We'll be running this one as approval voting." Furnace said. "If your answer's yes go to the plant side; if your answer's no go to the animal side. First proposal: Hand saws."

Children had made chalk drawings of plants and animals on this particular terrace, and as it so happened, it worked better than trying to point to different sides. So they were painted on and used this way, in this specific courtyard at least.

(In other courtyards people put clay balls into one of two different pots, held up white and black cards, or even in one case used a replica ballot box from the old London Mayoral elections. Vote-by-jungle pleased the little ones, though, who often staged mock votes on things like whether or not jellybeans were real.)

The notetaker tallied everyone, noting that three loitered, neutral, in the middle.

"Hammers."

A few people crossed the square in one direction or the other, and the notetaker wrote that down.

"Files, as in the sanding tools."

People once again moved back and forth. Things continued in this vein for some time.

Eventually, they finished with the tools and went on to different topics, ranging from whether velocipedes ought to be allowed on the footpaths (no consensus), what to do with common food allergies in cafeterias (many supported one low-allergen cafeteria per neighborhood, some said that was something that should be worked out within the neighborhoods themselves based on if locals had specific food allergies, one adventurous soul suggested that each cafeteria in a neighborhood be dedicated to not having a different allergen and was met with confusion), and so on and so forth.

"All right, this looks like the last one." Furnace took a deep breath. "If you can't deal with talk about this topic, there's nothing else, so it's all right to go home now. This one's about if Care should be allowed to hold someone who's an active danger to themselves against their will."

Everyone looked around.

"I don't think most of you know this," Furnace said, stepping down off the bench, "but I was imprisoned in the Royal Beth in a single alone for two days, even though I wasn't an active danger to myself, so I don't like the idea on principle. But... I can see the argument for keeping someone away from their shoelaces. So I'm conflicted."

Furnace stopped in the middle of the square, amongst everyone else, and took a deep breath. "Does anyone else have any comments?"

"I wonder," someone said, "would your answer be different if you were in Care here, instead of in the Beth? It's a very different place."

"I had. An uncle. On the Surface," someone else said. "He didn't get help. I think this needs to happen."

"It should have a time limit," said a third. "Maybe if it's only a certain number of days?"

"They'd come back even if they tried, right? So it's less critical than it would be on the Surface."

"What happens when someone gets detained under false pretenses? And that's a when, not an if, given human nature."

The discussion was more careful and sensitive than she'd initially feared.

"I think I'm okay with two days, if - there's people there to actually help," Furnace said, eventually. "Is that - the final proposal - everyone wants to support?"

"I have a proposal," said a teenager. "Can I hug you?"

"Of course," Furnace said, and then there was another arm around her, and another, and then she let herself sag into the support and wept.

"Hey," another voice said, from behind her. "Sorry to interrupt, but, um... can we vote now?"

Furnace could not put herself together, so: "Can - someone else - please?"

So an older woman climbed up onto the bench behind her. "The final proposal is that if you are going to hold someone who is trying to kill themselves, it must be in an environment where people are actually helping and interacting with you, the against-one's-will part can only last a maximum of two days, and if you want to leave after that they have to let you no matter what. And if you say afterwards that you were only held because someone was trying to hurt, punish, or otherwise get rid of you, you will be believed first unless the evidence is overwhelmingly the other way. Correct?"

A general "Yes" rose from the crowd around her.

"Hands?"

The hands went up, but people were looking at Furnace, so she swallowed and put her hand up. Open.

"Consensus achieved," said the woman on the bench. "That's everything. Peter, I think it's your turn to go to Neighborhood?"

“Yes," Peter said. The notetaker handed the notes to him, and he clutched them to his chest and ambled back to his room.

The woman climbed back down from the bench, and hands sat Furnace down. Someone brought Furnace a cup of cheap, bracingly bitter tea, of the kind Tracklayers favored. Furnace drank deeply.

The Gracile Agent came up to Furnace. "Is this usually how these things go?"

Furnace looked up at her. "Without my breakdown at the end, but more or less."

Peter would take these conclusions to the neighborhood meeting. Furnace had been to that meeting before as well: fourteen representatives of different courtyards sat around a table, and a broadly similar process of consensus-seeking took place.

Sometimes things ended there: a number of things were contentious but still fundamentally local, such as the location of a new cafeteria.

If things needed more cooperation between larger groups, these conclusions would go upwards again. Communities, composed of one representative per neighborhood, would vote on most final policies.

Communities were also the final escape valve for the ideological difference truly irreconcilable: self-sorting. Different communities would create their own modes of being, and all in the city were required to make it as easy as possible for people to move to their chosen home. The city was small enough to walk across, for visits.

Then, for issues that concerned the whole city, there was Large Governance.

This was a body with one representative per community. Some communities selected their representatives by holding full votes with one ballot per citizen, some had one vote per courtyard, a few had their community meeting select them, and in the Silverdale community - instead of letting people volunteer - they selected three adults fully at random and had the election held between them.

However communities selected their representatives, each served a term of five years, and could serve only once in their lifetime; but the various communities staggered their terms, so that at the beginning of every year some entered and some left, to preserve continuity of the institution. All representatives were still required to work full hours same as anyone else, in public-facing posts so they could see the people they were to represent. Recall elections could be held to withdraw representatives at any time.

That was Large Governance the governing body. But as the Gracile Agent had found, Large Governance had a soul as well.

The blue flame in the center of the City was its people's opinions, its sense of justice, its guiding light. Perhaps the soul of the City did not care about such things as the exact distribution of library books - but when there was a need in a part of the city that was not fulfilled, the flame would flicker and fork and migrate away from the center of its bowl. It would need to be asked exactly what the problem was, whether by the assembly asking twenty questions or the Gracile Agent communing directly, but it was how Governance knew when something had to be done.

The flame, too, was how they resolved deadlocks, or determined whether they ought to listen to people who believed that they were being smothered under an uncaring majority.

(If one thought about it, this last one made it questionable whether the flame was "just" the opinions of the people. But few knew that the City was a person, not just a benevolent force.)

It was possible Large Governance could work without this magic. But it made critical and rapid decisions more easily than passing them all the way down through the layers, and nobody was truly left without a voice.

There wasn't just the job of Tracklayer anymore; there were dozens of places and hundreds of jobs. And because like everyone else Furnace took shifts, she picked a handful to rotate between.

She took cartloads of food from warehouses to those who were ill and frail.

She would sweep streets, remove the garbage, and unclog the drains. And greet everyone on the way, and answer the questions people asked her.

She kept alert at firehouses while the career firemen slept; she woke early regardless, and thus waking slightly earlier to cover the witching hour was no great burden. (At first, becoming a fireman was her responding to a joke about her name being Furnace. Then she found she rather enjoyed a job consisting mostly of time for reading books and playing cards, occasionally interrupted by screaming terror that kept it from becoming boring.)

And the last one - childcare, specifically the point at which childcare shaded into teaching.

Furnace enjoyed bouncing babies on her lap and talking nonsense to them, and didn't mind ensuring that eight-year-olds played nicely with the pickaxe handles. But the real magic was seeing the moment the fire lit in the eyes of people old enough to understand. Teenagers paid more attention to civics lessons from the legendary Furnace Ancona herself, and everyone paid attention to war stories about marching on the bosses of the Moloch Line.

(There was another story she should have had from before the Union, before she ever became a Tracklayer. Something about a factory and a specific Master. But every time someone else mentioned it, her thoughts snagged on the ragged edges of a hole in her memory, and she felt cold and ill.

They stopped asking about that story, after a while.)

Meanwhile, January preferred things like sorting returned library books. There was no Ministry of Public Decency here, and if she had any say in the matter there would never be. She shelved books and gave recommendations to anyone who asked.

She worked at Care; and, like the group she'd put Furnace into, she organized and managed small circles where people with similar experiences could find catharsis in relating to each other.

She identified a specific kind of nervous exhaustion that often occurred in people who had been worked past their limits for many years before they moved into the City. These people couldn't believe that anyone would ever willingly do work or contribute to society. It took months of rest before they discovered what it felt like to want to help. (And she had bitter thoughts about how such situations created people who could not believe in a better way because of how brutally their lives had treated them.)

As to her first love, academics, she ran in the circles of the worker-philosophers who spoke and debated in local amphitheaters.

Introductory lectures on basic theory of government were well-attended - people who wanted to participate in higher levels of the local government needed to know what they were talking about. So those, she created a schedule for. But sometimes she just had the urge to show up and rant about Spinoza for three hours, and so long as the lecturer's stool was empty nobody could stop her.

In the evenings, the amphitheaters were the sober alternative to pubs. People discussed news of revolutions Above and debated the relative merits of different philosophers.

Sometimes others would visit. September did state visits occasionally, as the Railway Board had somehow managed to ram him through as Balmoral's Castellan and the Crown did not have enough influence this far out to stop them, and when September was in the City he kept up his nightly poetry readings - though here it was to an audience that saw his discussions of the Masters' sophistry as revelations.

The city was filled with Furnace's people, and sure, many of them were happy with just living somewhere the Masters weren't. But in the amphitheaters, January ranted about the purpose of the Masters, the tyranny of stars, the nature of light. And people cheered, and January thought that maybe, just maybe, the City was something more than just a little experiment after all.

One day, Furnace showed up to the Gracile Agent at lunch, slammed both palms on the table, and asked, "The city has a mind, right?"

Surely she already knew this, the Agent thought. "...Yeah?"

"Is there any way I can talk to it?"

The Agent paused. "Well, you would need to undertake a course of study worth years..."

Furnace's face fell.

"...if you were to do this by yourself. But perhaps if I was to serve as an intermediary, I could filter out the extremes and let you make contact."

Furnace squinted. "How would I know that you weren't just, say, psychically making the whole thing up yourself?"

"You can leave a mark in the city that I do not know about, and ask it about that."

"And what assurance would I have that you weren't secretly having someone spy on me to tell you what the mark was?"

"None," the Agent said, simply. "At some point this has to come down to trust, and I can only hope that I have yours."

"You are a skilled liar," Furnace said.

"Yes. But this is too important to you for me to lie about. So, the question stands: do you trust me?"

Furnace closed her eyes, took a breath in, took a breath out. "Do it."

The Agent startled. "Wait, now?"

"Before I lose my nerve."

The steps spiraled downwards, and at the bottom there was soft earth.

"I need to be holding you to protect your mind," the Gracile Agent said, sitting and opening her arms, and reluctantly Furnace set aside her helmet and settled in.

"Close your eyes," the Agent said, and Furnace did.

"Listen to my breathing," the Agent said, and Furnace did.

And everything was gone.

Furnace had expected resentment, from someone who had never asked to become a city, or frustration, at not being whole. Instead, the most prominent emotion she found was astonishment, awe, and gratitude. The one who would become the City had been left helpless for so long - becoming increasingly certain that her dreams were impossible - only for providence to give her her greatest wish.

The City was broken, but it was healing. People moved in and filled it with purpose and meaning, and so it had slowly been able to unclench its grasp on tight alleys and narrow passageways. Cleaning out rubble was the lifting of a weight that it hadn't realized was there. The Gracile Agent was going about sewing shut gaping wounds with a technique that hurt but was effective.

The Deaf quarter was unexpected, but met with curiosity and protectiveness. They deserved a city too, since nobody else would give them one.

Even the Creditor was surprisingly gentle with the City, its touch upon the City's boundaries measured and careful. This may have been a marriage of convenience, but there was a cautious affection growing there.

Furnace showed the City the deeds of May, who was the Manager, and a protective anger rose within it. It would draw its walls together and warn its people. She would not have to be afraid.

The City showed her that the floors would always be warm: it was, after all, a Furnace. The residents would never need to import coal for heat. They would not be subject to sooty chimneys and choking smoke. And - the City, shyly, showed Furnace an image of herself huddled on the floor crying, and of its doing what it could to embrace her, forming a nest of that warmth.

Furnace dug deeply, deeply, and finally managed to lay out the fear that the state of the City was her fault.

The City forgave her.

Certainly, part of the difference from her dreams was the City's painful past. But part of it was that other people lived in the City, and they too were changing the City to meet their own needs.

The City would always be there for her, as much as it could be.

Furnace was floating upwards on a sea of being loved, being held, being forgiven, and she broke the surface -

- in a flood of tears.

The Gracile Agent was, quite honestly, not nearly as good at being comforting as her partner was. But she did her best to hold onto Furnace and let the woman cry, because Furnace needed it and she was there.

"You know, I was afraid I'd have to protect you from something much worse," the Agent said, eventually. "But that was surprisingly positive."

"Surprisingly?" Furnace asked.

"It bared its teeth and told me not to try anything. You got nothing but love."

"I mean, maybe it figured I was having a bad time and softened things compared to what it would otherwise think."

The Agent said, "That would in itself be a demonstration of how much the City cares about you, actually. The idea that it would care about one little human being enough to be gentle to you specifically is remarkable."

"But that's just because it is me."

"You've been spending all this time afraid that the state of this place reflects on you, you just got forgiven for it by the one entity that could truly completely forgive you, and you can't even accept it? Am I going to have to take you back to Care?"

"...I think I'd like that, actually."

"Then put on your tin can and let's get moving."

(City-Furnace knew the story of what Furnace had done before she became a union leader, the incident that made little Furnace feel ill when people tried to ask. City-Furnace had grown to encompass tens of thousands of minds, none of which had their memory altered, and so - though its personal memory of the event remained missing - the few hundred who agreed best said that the story went something like this:

The Master of the Bazaar Mr. Fires ran a factory. One day, it decreed that the workers there would no longer be allowed to wear protective helmets. A woman evacuated the grounds and jammed the machinery to trap Mr. Fires inside: it was there for three days. Every single worker in the factory was fired, but the woman earned the nickname of "Furnace" for that act because "what else could contain a fire?"

City-Furnace did not remember what happened in Hillchanger Tower either; only one person knew, and City-Furnace could not access a single person's thoughts. It only knew three things: that the incident had something to do with the Discordance, that something there had tampered with its memories, and that this marked the divergence between City-Furnace and little Furnace. Little Furnace was saved there, but City-Furnace had been left behind.

City-Furnace had been envious, once. But seeing little Furnace in so much pain made it realize that the other path would not have magically made everything better. Little Furnace had suffered too.)

As a compromise when the City had been raised, January had been "allowed" to help design a Dark District. She'd thought it was ridiculous to call a piece of a map a compromise when her original hope had been for an army, so she refused to have anything to do with it.

And then two Care co-workers who had started wearing black velvet veils dragged her over to visit.

Solely by being labeled as the "Dark District", Liberationists, curious sorts, and those who were already blind had moved in - and all of them added their own ingenuity to it. There were placards in bump-language to the left of almost every door that served as house numbers and business signs. Food almost never had sauces and could be eaten with the fingers, and furthermore, was prepared by methods that could be practiced in the dark: using bread slicers as miter boxes and something that looked like an unwaffled waffle iron to sear things on both sides. Wind-up mechanisms made chimes of various sorts tinkle gently at every corner. There were large bells for announcements and emergencies.

And every single person wore a black velvet veil to block out the faint light that spilled over from the rest of the city.

Then after a few hours of showing her around, January's coworkers put a velvet veil and thin-soled shoes on her and led her around.

Streets had different pavers and textures to navigate by. The City's underfloor heating, being warmer inside and cooler outside, had also made it so that heat outlined every doorway and the intersections were cold. Bead curtains were used on public buildings because they would never slam into faces. Things that were easily lost had iron or steel on them, so they could be found by sweeping a magnet on a stick across the floor.

The last thing they brought January to was a school, where children learned to read in bump-language and write using a grid and stylus. Diagrams for books were fabric pages, with yarn and leather and beads sewn in the right places. Mathematics was taught using not just blocks for counting, but compasses that could draw arcs in tactile wax and pins for points for geometry. Teens who were old enough were taught to touch-type on the typewriter - which meant that even the ones who had only been raised in bump-language could still write in ink print.

It was the school that made her realize: this was not a place where people were vacationing. This was not a place where people were debating philosophy. This was a place people could live their whole lives.

January knew that esoteric arts could be used to block off all light and enforce absolute darkness. She offered to do so. Her co-workers told her that she needed to be an actual resident to propose things for the community, but she was perfectly welcome to move in.

She went home and laid awake all night.

She couldn't actually live her whole life in absolute darkness. She couldn't wear the velvet veil. She still had so much work to do.

But she was already fluent in bump-language. There were tactile maps on pedestals in every courtyard of what one could find nearby. It was trivial for even a sighted person to memorize the layout of their rooms in the dark. She could have an extra tag attached to her clothing to say which color it was, so she wouldn't make any serious mistakes when dressing. And her hobbies of teaching, debate, and argument were not affected at all by being in the dark.

Moving in wouldn't even be hard.

So she did.

The City grew. People had already named their own courtyards and streets: Liberty Way, Docker's Friend, Sunset Corner.

The street signs were being standardized to black capital letters on a white background on a rectangle of a specific size. This was so that they could not be mistaken for anything else, and nothing else could be mistaken for them. This was something someone had come up with and everyone had agreed on, it had been (relatively) easily passed up through the layers, and Large Governance had passed the decree. The blue flame didn't move about the proposal, and Furnace hadn't been involved at all.

A community had grown far bigger than the neighboring ones, and had to be split. A redistricting committee was selected from among the locals, and though Furnace was afraid that the results would be contentious, the new community budded off with surprisingly little fuss. Their first act was to establish a local sports league, so good will was re-established quickly.

Some local teachers decided, on their own, to offer reading and arithmetics classes to adults who had never learned such things. The initiative spread quickly. No rules or decrees were ever involved, just people learning of what was already going on and deciding to help.

Sometimes, the need for a type of work decreased, or was sporadic. The need to dismantle broken buildings went away once no broken buildings were left. Prehistoricists might build things to accelerate and automate work. That was fine; they just reduced or stopped signup sheets for those jobs.

Occasionally, testimonials of work being done for the common good were sent up from courtyards and neighborhoods to communities. Large Governance might even declare that they counted as shifts of work.

It was possible that the city might begin falling behind in work, or in specific types of work. But an extra hour a week for everyone, and perhaps an adjustment in work shift weighting, would be more than sufficient.

Finally, in times of crisis: Even in a bitter, hard city like London, there were people who responded to great tragedies by helping without expectation of reward. And so, in the City, where people were already so involved with its decision-making and welfare, almost everyone pitched in.

The Gracile Agent and Determined Writer were sitting on their beds, both doing a bit of calming mending before going to sleep.

"I think," the Agent said, "I might be able to use the same technique as the City to speak with the Creditor. For a long time I have wondered if it was pleased with what we did. If, for that matter, it even noticed the substitution."

The Writer looked up. "Perhaps, while you're at it, ask it to help us grow food. We can't be self-sufficient solely on mushrooms and insects."

"I will need somewhere to stay, outside the City, where I will not be disturbed."

This ascent, or perhaps descent, would be far more difficult than the first, because the Creditor was infinitely older. It would take her weeks. It could take her months.

If asked why she would go to all this effort when the Solicitor-Baroness was right there, the Agent would have said that the Solicitor-Baroness was a Devil, and could theoretically be influenced by someone else. But her personal reason, in the end, was to see if she could.

The special request that the Determined Writer found on his desk on this day was odd.

Bloodroot. Horseradish, or the closest he could get. Potatoes. Wine, grape specifically (odd, since the Tracklayers' alcohol of choice was distilled spirits). Flour, of which several types were listed so he could pick the cheapest one. Pickled Whitsun eggs.

January's name was on the bottom of the page as the contact.

"Hi," the Writer said, later, meeting her. "I'll figure out a way to get these things. I was just wondering why some of them were so specific."

"Passover," January said.

And the Writer thought back to a Passover with an old business associate turned friend. But there he remembered fresh Surface lamb, and fig jam, and parsley.

"These are... substitutions, for meaner circumstances."

"Wait, how do you know -"

"I'm not Jewish. But someone I was close to was."

"You're no longer close?"

"Not after I began..." The Writer winced. "diverging in ideology from the Society types."

January did not bother to reassure him. He was trying, yes, but he was still one of the rich, and contrition was worth far less than contribution.

The Writer asked, "How much grape wine do you actually want? Not the minimum. The amount you would use if you could."

"Hmm. Three bottles, I think. There aren't going to be that many of us, but there are some."

"I believe I have a couple bottles of Broken Giant in my personal collection. I'll have to check."

Well, some contribution was better than nothing. "Thank you."

April was surprised to find a letter addressed to her that was entirely in bump-language, so she took it to January, who could better read it.

January had learned a great deal about the lives of the blind. She also had not learned sign language, and was not particularly eager to. For months she had engaged in an extended argument with April about whether April should just learn lip-reading. Once April had learned enough sign language to communicate with the deaf, they confirmed to her that one did not "just learn" lip-reading. One had to infer every word from less than half of the information that would otherwise have been there, making it a difficult intellectual puzzle even if one already knew what language sounded like in the first place.

When January had a free moment, then, April simply came up to and thrust the letter at her. She watched as January's fingers glanced across the page.

[This is a letter from someone who is both deaf and blind who wants to move here], January wrote on her piece of paper at her usual spectacular speed. [I've actually been thinking about this myself.]

January put out her hand as if to shake April's; April obliged. But instead of grasping it firmly, January began fingerspelling directly into her palm. L-I-K-E T-H-I-S, January spelled, and then she withdrew her hand and wrote [Now with your eyes closed].

April did. This time it was substantially harder - April was only really familiar with how the letters looked, not how they felt - but even so, she did manage to piece together a S-P-E-L-L W-O-R-D-S.

[Give me a few days, I have articles], January wrote, finally, and waved April away.

April hadn't been able to get in a single word edgewise.

January had been like this ever since April had lost her hearing and most of her voice: lecturing as if April had lost her mind as well. April thought, sourly, that the word "dumb" used to only mean unable to speak, and then only recently had gained the connotation of being brainless. Why was not being able to communicate the same thing as not being able to think at all?

(The Gracile Agent spent weeks, maybe even months, slowly weaning herself off human thought patterns and thinking far, far more slowly. She knew she was supposed to eat, and bathe, but - she'd selected a spot far, far away from the City. So she had an enormous tank of water, and Incorruptible Biscuits to gnaw on, so that she could just lay there: her perceptions, her shape, her mind becoming less and less human.)

(And after weeks of this asceticism, after weeks of increasingly slowing down - the Gracile Agent finally, finally reached the thinnest and most recent crust of the Creditor's thoughts.)

curiosity

mirrored and mutual. a scientist-mage, now supplicant and petitioner

a question of intent

the state of the bargain. the health of the city.

the letter and the spirit both were furnished, and yet the result was still unexpected. an infant-city slowly learning to trust and love again despite its betrayal. whence the betrayal?

rescue from a future that the petitioner swears will never be allowed to pass

and this impossible defiance of fate, undertaken to what end?

for the sake of the individual with this dream so enormous as to encompass a city. to see her wonder, her happiness

this is tinged with regret

the dreamer has suffered greatly, due to the way the work was done. the deed would gladly be repeated, but the cost was dear

a duty is owed

the duty is collectively held. no one could bear it alone

a duty is still owed

understood, with chagrin

there is still another question

the creation of sustenance, for thousands and thousands of mouths to feed, cannot be undertaken by the city alone; if the city is to thrive it is necessary to provide more

why

an image of the alternative: hungry zailors with knives stalking the corridors of the ship. fear of attachment lest a friend become a victim. profound personal shame at the failure of a captain's duty. this city/ship is a thousand times larger, and thus so is the duty

understanding of the analogy. but why provide the analogy, and not the logic that the petitioner is using internally?

because the creditor understands the world in terms of duty, and so if phrased this way the purpose of the request might be better understood

more considerate than expected from one of the little ones

appreciation

agreement; bury what is requested and an earnest attempt will be made to replicate

gratitude of the highest degree

an invitation to confer again

And the Gracile Agent surfaced, gasping, several days later. Her limbs trembled with the effort of pulling a cord that raised a flag.

A little while later, the Determined Writer, out of breath from running, knelt beside her. "Did it work?" he asked.

"Per... fect... ly," the Agent said, in a slow voice. Her skin was stretched out over her bones, now: her body had devoured itself for sustenance.

"Save your strength and don't talk more right now; I'm taking you to the hospital." The Writer gently supported the Agent's head like an infant's, as he brought her to a place where she could be watched and slowly re-fed.

Three days later, the Writer came bearing a vial with a single teaspoon's worth of Hesperidean Cider, the elixir that cured all wounds, likely bought at a price so dear that she knew not to ask about it.

Afterwards, when she was well enough (and no longer so stretched-out in time) to relate the whole story of what she had seen, the Writer's smile when she said that the Creditor would help the city make farms was wide with open joy.

(And it would take all the magic of the Neath - that Hesperidean Cider, mastery of the Shapeling Arts allowing her to manipulate the shape of muscles as they grew back in, Tincture of Vigor, food imbued with unnaturally strong restorative properties - for the rest of the Agent's recovery to take weeks instead of months.)

Furnace had previously told January in no uncertain terms that she could not plunge the entire City into darkness. But January had worked on the physics of light and darkness, and had other contacts who did as well, and someone else from the Calendar Council helped her create a proof of concept where she plunged a precise square outside the City into darkness with an exact edge where the darkness ended. Seeing this, Furnace and Large Governance agreed to let exactly and only the Dark District have its light taken away.

And that process took weeks, because January dared not scale the process up; using small charges meant that any lack or gap in the borders would not accidentally take the entire city with it. But it was always satisfying, after setting out the perimeters, to see the darkness billow into form. And she did learn quite a bit from being able to observe the process in a controlled environment this many times.

In the end, the total darkness that pressed in on January's eyes when she sat in on Dark District meetings coming to consensus, ate in cafeterias where being in the dark heightened the feeling of smell and taste, or went to libraries where everything was typeset in bumps, gave her the feeling she was supposed to but had never quite felt on Shabbat: experiencing a taste of the world to come.

With the blessing of the Creditor acquired, farms began to spring up.

They were not very much like Surface farms. One planted what they hoped would be replicated, but sometimes potatoes would turn into sacs of (admittedly nutritious) spiders, or Incorruptible Biscuits into equally incorruptible flatbread that carried the unfortunate odor of seething amber. Still, canned tomato soup poured into the ground sprouted pitcher plants full of a similar substance, and carrots would usually turn into forked twinned monstrosities that, despite the shape, still recognizably felt and tasted like carrots. Vegetable oil came up in clusters like grapes. After many tries at cultivating increasingly obscure grains, millet was the one that finally worked. Canned sardines grew into fish-head plants that were barely edible but made an excellent broth. Whole spices were surprisingly well replicated - so well, in fact, that serious discussions of exporting City-cumin and City-turmeric began.

Upon further experimentation, the dry red beans that came in spiral-shaped pods - while not terribly appetizing on their own - would attempt to put out roots when left in a jar of water for a few days, unable to grow into actual plants because of their total lack of leaves but able to produce delicate crunchy beansprouts.

The Writer spent a substantial amount of time and money importing increasingly strange foods to attempt planting, some with names that a British person who wasn't a language prodigy couldn't pronounce. Coconuts (did not become a plant but, instead, somehow, a decorative fountain). Kale (near perfect). Chia seeds (the plant looked completely wrong but the actual seeds were still eminently usable for thickening sauce).

Crops were selectively bred until the Creditor-farms could reliably replicate the results, and a local cuisine began to emerge - more flavorful and lighter than London's. A spicy stir-fry of spiders, mushrooms, and bean sprouts was made portable by wrapping it in leaves, fish-head broth was fed to invalids, and coconut water became a popular drink for people doing hard labor.

After a great deal of effort expended on replicating tea leaves, for they were Londoners, they instead discovered that the best way to acquire new tea was to pour tea directly into the ground. The copious flowers produced by this plant, when brewed, imitated that cheap, bitter tea many remembered (a few even fondly) from their time working on the Railway. It would never pass muster in a London tea room - in fact, some might question if this even counted as tea at all - but it was theirs.

There were, of course, dangers to the City.

The Creditor ensured that London authorities, devils, and representatives of the Bazaar never quite made it to the City. The access road had a tendency to turn invading authorities around, such that they could spend half an hour marching forwards and still somehow find themselves back where they started. Trying to bypass the road and go around would go even more poorly, what with the wastelands already being scarred with spatial and temporal anomalies left by the Devils' reality-breaking weaponry.

But protection against authorities was not the same as protection against everyone. There were the bandit-marauders called the Clay Highwaymen. The few people who, even in a place where nobody had to go hungry and half the city was still empty buildings ready to be filled, still committed crimes anyway. The people who technically committed no violence but could enthrall or shatter others with their words.

Instead of Constables, it was a citizen's duty to take up poles tipped with limb-trappers and clothes-entanglers to physically separate fights. Instead of a separate military, anyone physically able enough would learn how to fight, and when there was a need a call would be put out for volunteers.

There were also places for people who needed to hide from specific other people they were afraid of. The simplest option was to move to a different courtyard and ask the people there to protect you, which they almost always did. And masks were a surprisingly common option. For the genuinely paranoid, the Dark District's absolute darkness now made it the obvious choice (though one would then, of course, have to live in absolute darkness). But someone made magical trinkets that would physically shove people away when activated (though they were difficult to find, as the maker remained anonymous), and Prehistoricists were researching a little something for carrying in a pocket that would rattle if someone was near.

Most communities had a system for trials that was essentially similar to that of representation in general: one representative per courtyard for trials in the neighborhood; one representative per neighborhood in trials at the community level.

Some tried other ways. Silverdale, for example, picked participants for their juries purely at random. Riverhead would have two people take part in a ritual debate in front of a small audience.

All consequences and punishments started from the same two basic premises:

Firstly, the natural consequence for someone who committed a crime was to fix what they broke.

Secondly, people did things for reasons. If you addressed the reasons themselves, the things they did would go away.

So often as not, people went to counseling in anger management or conflict resolution. School bullies had their home life investigated to see if parental mistreatment was involved, and a caretaker from outside the region was often sent to where the bullying was happening to see if it was in fact the adults who were failing in their protective duties. People who engaged in vandalism were required to spend time with the Beautification Committee, where after they fixed what they vandalized, they were allowed the opportunity to design a mural so that they could leave a visible and personal mark on the world that made it more beautiful rather than less.

As to imprisonment, there were gated courtyards where guards and prisoners lived in exactly the same conditions and shared the same amenities. Prisoners could go to work shifts same as anyone else, though they had to be escorted and monitored by guards and were barred from jobs that involved the vulnerable; and their workplaces were obligated to always have at least 50% free citizens.

There were also more unusual punishments. The Dark District might obligate the wearing of bells on the ankles. In Bone City, the Prehistoricists were working on monitor-lizards that would notify authorities if someone left a specific region - though currently they all had to be confined within only the one region, owing to the fact that they couldn't get the fences to overlap. In Libera, some could leave early if they consented to wearing piercings in violant, the Neath's unique pseudocolor that enforced memory, such that their faces would be unforgettable. In Silverdale, sometimes abusers were simply forbidden from cohabiting with anyone else, at all, ever again.

The City was still very new. Some practices might die out; others could be invented. And there was always room for others to come up with more.

When Furnace woke up one day with three simultaneous headaches and stuffy noses and sore throats, she forced herself to get up - not because sick people needed to go on work shifts, as that would have been obviously cruel, but to make it to a central corridor inside her courtyard. There was a place here to write down if one needed to be checked on: she put her own name on the list, ticked the box for being ill, and then staggered back to her room so she could shiver in her own bed. Less than an hour later, someone was knocking.

"My name is John, and if it's all right with you I'd like to ask you a few questions," her visitor said, pulling out a board where a clothespin held down sheets of paper.

The blue flame reacting violently when someone in Large Governance coughed last week, and the Writer's statistics to explain why, had activated epidemic protocol. The checklist was just the thin end of the wedge. Aside from activating the Writer's nurses to create field hospitals, the availability of most work was temporarily suspended, as was the work requirement for shelter, so that people could stay home if they were ill. Some public places were also shuttered - Furnace did not look forward to the ranting from January about having all the amphitheaters closed, but needs must.

(In an extreme situation, Furnace's work shift system could even be turned backwards on itself: staying inside one's own dwelling would be designated as the "work", a certain amount of which was required to keep one's housing. The Writer had insisted on planning for a situation this absurd; Furnace hoped desperately that it would never come to pass.)

John went through a checklist (influenza, or something like) and took Furnace's temperature (feverish). "Unfortunately you have a complication, so we're going to need to put you up at Abigail's place for a bit, if that's all right with you."

Furnace hesitated, but then her back right face said, in a miserably congested voice, "By complication he means we're just as sick as you are, and your elbows are the wrong way around to help." So she let herself be led away.

While she hadn't trained as a nurse under the Writer, Abigail had children and grandchildren enough to understand how to tend to the sick. So in this room, Abigail's things had been pushed aside for four cots, two of which were already filled with shivering, sniffling figures. One was an older woman; the other held a mother with a sick infant.

"I don't feel like I belong here," Furnace said, between coughing fits.

"You still need extra help," John said, and helped her to the third cot. "So we're getting you some." Furnace was too sick to object further.

While she and she and she were being cared for, with tea and soup and steam full of a sharp-smelling oil to inhale, Furnace's fevered mind wandered the edge of unconsciousness.

These weren't even her own nightmares. Instead, she was presented with images of a heavy printing press slamming shut over and over again inches away from her fingers, a bin full of grain that abruptly turned liquid underneath her feet and swallowed her whole, slowly suffocating over years of her lungs filling with cotton fibers thrown off of a spinning jenny, and precariously balanced tanks of fluid and distilling machinery looming over her while she wasn't allowed to wear a protective helmet. More than once, Furnace woke in tears.

Eventually, though, she had a dream that was not of terror or danger. Instead, she was on a bed of soft moss in a tropical jungle. She wasn't achy or shivery or congested. She could just lie there and do nothing. So she did.

After a long time, there was a voice behind her. Her own voice? "You'll have to wake up soon. But I gave you as much rest as I could. I hope it helped."

When Furnace surfaced back into herself, she was still exhausted and coughing: but the fever had broken.

The first Furnace heard of the New Factory was some weeks later, at a Large Governance meeting.

Furnace did not vote with the main body, and these days she sat in the back and observed, but she was called on to comment on issues with some regularity, and occasionally when meetings turned into pointless arguments she stood and reminded the assembly of their reason for being here. Her opinion was valued - and though her actual assistance was not often needed, the rare occasions on which she did not attend made it clear that the assembly saw her as the one who could cut through all arguments and provide clarity.

But then during an otherwise normal session of Large Governance, the attendant came to an oddly vague point on the agenda. "Bone City," the attendant said. "You wish to bring up an unusual development."

"There is -" and here the representative of Bone City steeled himself - "a venture, in my area. A group headed by Cornelius was in talks some weeks ago with a London company called Mounteson Industries."

There was some murmuring, but most were waiting for details.

Bone City continued, "They took over an unused amphitheater in my community. Crates from Moulin have been going in. Skeletons have been going out. I have my own opinions on this matter, but the nearby neighborhood appears to be being appeased by the new inflow of luxury goods."

"You mean bribes," Mushroom Town's representative cut in, and was shushed by the others.

Spikeville actually raised a hand and waited for approval before speaking. "I was wondering what the extra traffic was. You're exporting beasts of burden?"

Bone City said, "Horses for pulling carriages, at the moment. I believe they're looking at automatic fans next."

The representative from Rail Camp raised their hand and was called on. "I object to the prospect of having a business venture in the city we founded specifically to escape London's societal and cultural strictures."

Murmurs of agreement were stopped by the attendant raising a hand. "Is that a statement you wish to be voted on?"

"No," said Rail Camp. "I don't want this to just be a statement. I want them to be kicked out."

This got a much stronger response from those assembled.

Furnace banged on the side of her helmet with a fist to quiet the assembled, and stood up. "What you are asking is to convene a Special Session."

"Correct," Rail Camp said.

"Would that it could be on an issue that I wasn't personally entangled with," Furnace said. "But as many here know, Cornelius and I have had a... difficult past, and I have no hope of being neutral on the subject."

The assembly was unsettled.

Furnace continued. "But. The procedures for an inquest are written into our founding documents, and there have already been successful instances on the community level. I fully believe that all of you are capable of this. Juliana of the Dark District?"

"Yes?" the representative of the Dark District said. (Even outside the district, she wore a heavy black velvet veil embroidered with a motif of closed eyes and had all her documents made up in bump-language.)

"You have participated in a community-level inquest, have you not?"

"I have." She had once been one of eleven citizens who ruled on the fate of a man who had killed his wife multiple times.

So the Dark District representative came to the front of the room, putting one hand on the bowl that contained the blue flame to orient herself, and began to organize matters. "We are being asked to convene an inquest to find facts and decide on what to do with the New Factory in Bone City.

"Each community will send an individual who is not part of this current legislative body, but who has participated in a position of neighborhood or higher, to participate in a Special Session. This special session will begin two weeks from now, on Monday the 14th, assuming there are no major objections?"

None came.

Dark District said, "Bone City, as the current representative of the affected community you will be asked to testify, assuming you are capable."

Bone City shook their head, and then a moment later softly clapped twice as the people of the Dark District did for an audible equivalent. "I will be unable to fairly represent the opinions of the entire community. I would like to send three representatives in my place: one for the New Factory itself, one for the neighborhood in which this is occurring, and one for the rest of the community."

Dark District said, "It is likely that the New Factory will already have a representative or other speaker ready. It is your job to find us the two other representatives you propose."

"Understood. How soon?"

"One week. That goes for everyone else, too, we'll need your special representatives a week from now."

Agreement; scratching of pens.

Dark District continued. "You also mentioned that Cornelius of the Prehistoricists was involved. We will also need him to testify. Who here will be able to find him? Furnace?"

Furnace said, "Sorry, but I don't talk to him anymore. Someone else is going to have to."

"I can contact him," the Determined Writer said -

Riverhead's representative spoke. "I have another concern. The Railway Director here -" and here Riverhead pointed to the Determined Writer - "is very likely to have business interests that overlap with Mounteson Industries. If so, declare them now and recuse yourself from the Special Session. Yes, even if you are only going to be there as the interpreter."

The Determined Writer visibly flinched. "Why?"

"Because your mere presence may change people's answers to questions," Riverhead said. "Find replacements if you have to, but if you have anything to do with the Mountesons I do not want you here."

"I'm going to have to go through my business records," the Writer said -

"Don't bother." Riverhead pointed dramatically. "Your supplier for rockwool insulation for the station in the Hurlers was Occidental Mining Corporation, which is 70% owned by Mounteson Industries." Riverhead turned to everyone else. "You're welcome."

Apparently the assembled looked rather less grateful than Riverhead had expected, and so Riverhead awkwardly dropped their arm.

If the Director had other business entanglements I would be unsurprised, signed the representative of the Deaf quarter. He was a capitalist, and retains many of his contacts from that time. However, I believe discussion and consensus would be more useful than hanging accusations up with the laundry.

"Right," said Riverhead, chagrined. "Does anyone have a good argument for why we should allow the Writer to stay?"

The Determined Writer put up his own hand to signal that he was speaking for himself. "I don't see why this is necessary. I can be fair."

Mushroom Town's representative spoke up. "It's not about you being fair. It's about how your presence might pressure others into softening their words to remain in your good graces. Even without a formal hierarchy, many people listen to you when you speak."

The Writer said, "Form a consensus, then, if you're really so concerned."

So the attendant began. "Proposal: The Director of the Great Hellbound Railway is to be removed from the Special Session addressing the Bone City New Factory. Roll call begins now. Bone City?"

"Agree."

"Dark District?"

"Agree."

"Deaf Quarter?"

Agree.

Things continued in this vein for the entire list of communities. There was one abstain (Silverdale, since that was where Care was located) and no disagrees or blocks.

"Proposal passed," said the attendant. The Board Secretary scribbled.

(The name of "Board Secretary" was an artifact; they had imported the position after seeing how useful having a stenographer had been on the Railway Board, and never did change the name.)

"I'll stay out of this, then," said (and signed) the Writer. "Anyone else needing to recuse?"

Furnace Ancona stood. "As previously mentioned, I cannot be neutral in a situation that involves Cornelius for... personal reasons. I am voluntarily recusing myself."

There was a moment of awkward silence.

"...With that out of the way," Dark District said, "we need to talk about opening statements..."

Later, in Dante's Grill, the Determined Writer was having a tête-à-tête with one David Mounteson. At one point it had been a request from the Writer that if Mounteson wanted to do business with him again, Mounteson would have to leave the city. Unfortunately, things had since devolved.

"You changed, you know," Mounteson said. "When you knuckled under instead of breaking the strike, and then you got involved with all those Revs. Sometimes I think to myself, could I have prevented this? Was there any sequence of events in which you didn't end up indoctrinated by these people? But then I think about your partner and your Board."

"Don't talk that way about my partner."

"Fine, then. Did you ever get to see what's under that Ancona woman's pot? A Rubbery? One of those rat bastards?"

"She has a head," the Writer said testily. "And you're not her haberdasher."

"And that January woman's deranged rhetoric about tearing down the stars from the heavens - do you have any idea about what the death toll from that would end up being?"

The Writer flinched, remembering what January had told him about working conditions improving after the Black Death.

"See? You still have a conscience after all!" Mounteson declared triumphantly, as if an emotion was a valid argument.

"You're one to talk about conscience given the number of starving beggars on the streets of London."

"I would pay them just fine if they had the moral fiber to actually bother doing any work. Like your people."

"Yes, that's the problem I brought you here to discuss," the Writer said, digging his fingers into his thigh under the table. "You get to get away with paying the people of the City in trinkets because the City is already providing their room, board, and everything else they actually require."

"Your city."

"It's not my -"

"Oh, it's yours. You gave it to them off the Railway's land claim, which may I add is egregiously sized." Mounteson gestured expansively. "Half the Hinterlands belonging to, what is it, 'Creditor'?"

"The land," the Writer said, as patiently as he could (which admittedly was not very, after how long this argument had gone in circles), "is sovereign of itself. The dividends are rent. If I didn't pay it off, then the entire Railway would be obliterated."

"And here I was thinking you'd pulled some sort of coup de grâce on the Ministry of the Upper River. No, just another part of your deranged anarchy scheme."

"Anarchism."

"Anarchy." Mounteson stabbed his salad. "I thought you still had a shred of business acumen left in you. But I guess spending all that time in your utopia has made you go soft."

"If I'm soft for believing that I should be considerate to the literal earth the Railway relies upon, then fine!" The Writer threw up his hands. "Cut me up and put me in a pillow!"

"You're being too sensitive."

"I'd rather be too sensitive than disrespectful."

"Some things don't deserve to be respected."

"No, see, that's the thing. The concept of 'deserve' is entirely backwards. Put a man in base circumstances and forbid him from legitimate work and he becomes a criminal. Give that same man a place to live and an education and, after some time to adapt to his circumstances, he becomes an upstanding citizen. I have seen it happen over and over again with my own two eyes. That is the purpose of the City. Not some..." The Writer made a curlicue motion with one finger. "Londonish notion that I'm doing it to uplift unfortunates or something."

"Don't lie to yourself, Director. You're running a charity. Garçon!" Mounteson flagged down a waiter. "Do please give us the check!"

The Writer gritted his teeth and paid the bill.

The representatives for this special session were largely well-respected members of their communities, with the exception of Silverdale's usual sortition, which meant that their representative was a Tracklayer from the oldest days on the Moloch line, Libera, who sent a young adult as "representative of the next generation", and Bone City, whose representatives would be testifying instead of voting.

There would be no audience (nor did Large Governance have room for one), but the Board Secretary's transcripts of the proceedings would be typeset and printed overnight: the Determined Writer had discontinued his London newspaper and relocated all the equipment to the City.

This time, instead of the Determined Writer, there were six sign language interpreters - three per day, switching out on half-hour shifts, and each working every other day. (Real-time interpretation was profoundly taxing to the mind.) The Deaf quarter went to this much extra effort to allow one of their elders to attend.

Once everyone had drifted in, Furnace stood. "Before this special session begins, I would like to read a short prepared statement."

"You have the floor," the attendant told her, and gestured.

Furnace walked to the center of the room. She opened her visor, so that others could see her face.

"I will not be present for this session because I have a deep personal connection to one of the parties involved in it. My presence and my reactions would bias the results. But I will leave gladly.

"That's because I believe in what we have made together. I believe in your ability to do the right thing. And -" Furnace let her voice waver, just a bit, for effect - "I am very proud of you all."

Furnace gave the paper to the Board Secretary, who stowed it under the stack of empty notebooks that were soon to be filled with shorthand.

Everyone was standing and applauding, and a few were in tears, as Furnace walked back to her seat behind the assembly.

"Let us convene this Special Session." The attendant took roll call, and all recited a collective affirmation that this body's purpose was to serve the City and all its inhabitants.

And then:

"The following individuals have personal connections and cannot be present for this meeting: The Director of the Great Hellbound Railway and..." The attendant paused to brace themself. "And Furnace Ancona."

There was a collective intake of breath.

Furnace got up from her chair and held her back straight as she walked to the door. She reached out to the handle of the door. She turned it. She pushed it out. The closing of the door behind her was audible in the absolute silence.

Then the blue flame went out.

This was met with gasps, swearing, and a scream or two. The blue flame was what made Large Governance able to work as efficiently as it did, the ability to poll the population without polling the population, and now it was gone.

(Almost nobody was in a position to realize that the City itself was a Furnace Ancona, and so had followed the instruction to remove itself from the proceedings as well.)

The noise level was beginning to rise with "what now" and "we can't just" and "without it we're".

The Spikeville representative stood up, quieting everyone. "I would like to say something that Furnace once told my sister, a long time ago.

"She asked, why don't communities get their own blue flames? And Furnace told her:

"'It is as training. For in case the blue flame ever goes out and we must govern ourselves.'

"The blue flame is just the easiest way for us to tell what the city's overall thoughts are. But we still have our procedures. And they still work even if we have no flame."

The Spikeville representative sat down, to scattered applause and sighs.

This having taken the edge off the general terror, the assembly began to shuffle the various papers on their desks. Everyone with something to say had written statements, and the whole stack was given to everyone several days in advance to give time to read them. Many had prepared questions, or agendas they had been asked to bring by their own community.

The attendant gestured to a door at the side of the room. Someone standing there let in a small, portly man, who was pointed to the chair in the center of the group.

"You are much less intimidating than you sounded in the summons," the Factory Chief said, in a voice that sounded like he was trying to make a joke. Nobody laughed, or batted an eye for that matter.

Glances were shared, but it was the velvet-veiled representative from the Dark District who stood and actually began the questioning. "Why did you come to the City?"

"I was invited to help establish a factory here by my employer."

"Who is your employer?"

"Alexander Mounteson, of Mounteson Industries."

The Dark District representative visibly steeled themself. "Would you call yourself an owner, manager, boss, or other similar head position?"

"Yes."

"Do you have hiring or firing power?"

"Yes."

"Which one?"

"Both."

(The Libera representative was about to say something, only to have the one from Spikeville next to them make a distinct shushing motion. Spikeville wrote something on a small piece of paper and handed it to Libera. It read, Let him dig his own hole.)

The Dark District representative continued. "Do you expect to profit from this venture?"

"Yes."

"By profit do you mean social status, monetary gain, luxury goods, capacity to obtain what you want from others..."

The Chief said, "What's the difference?"

Furnace sat in the cafeteria upstairs from the proceedings, pushing mushroom hash back and forth on her plate without eating it.

What was the assembly doing? Were they in total disarray? What if Cornelius was more protective of his little venture than the welfare of the City? Furnace knew Cornelius had a tendency to massage the truth, but would the representatives know to box him in with more specific questions? What of the people of Bone City?

And what if this was the beginning of the end?

One of the off-duty interpreters tapped the table beside her. They whispered, "The assembly will be adjourning for lunch soon. You'll need to leave."

Furnace took a deep breath. In, out. She looked up at the interpreter. "Thank you."

She got up, scraped her mushroom hash into the food waste bin, and put her plate and fork into the dish bin. She walked away with her head held high, and did not look back.

The Determined Writer knew he would be told to recuse himself from the meeting in Large Governance, so he didn't even bother to show up. Instead, his partner being absent on one of her missions, he broke rocks at a worksite nobody else was at that day.

It turned out he was not good at breaking rocks, and only succeeded at knocking off random shards. Someone asked if he needed help. "No," he snarled, and the person who had offered backed away.

Six hours later his shoulders were burning, and so he went home and fell asleep.

The next day, his back and shoulders ached, and the soreness was a bracing reminder that he had not worked hard labor in a very long time. He forced himself to get up. If nothing else, he needed a painkiller and he needed to eat.

He swallowed an aspirin, then sat down and made himself porridge out of crumbs of an Incorruptible Biscuit in boiling water. He could have gone down the street to the cafeteria and gotten better fare, but he did not want to interact with others right now.

When the Writer had settled down in the City, he had drawn a line between his two lives. Things in civilization worked like in civilization, and things here worked like here.

Then the New Factory had gone and stomped all over this boundary, and the Writer's half-hearted attempts to try to stop it hadn't worked, and the Writer had been too afraid to say anything stronger. Now the Writer had dithered too long without taking a stance, and one was being forcibly taken for him.

The Writer finished his prole porridge and laid in his prole bed and worried about the fate of his prole city, and his shoulders ached because he wasn't strong enough to protect it.

Furnace paced around and around in her room. She didn't want to go outside, for fear that her feet would unconsciously carry her to Large Governance, but anxiety wouldn't let her sit still.

A knock on the door made her flinch, but then she steeled herself and opened it.

January was there, clutching an armful of books. "I thought you might want company. Considering."

"Thank you," Furnace said. "Are you well, given the circumstances?"

"Lecturing at an empty amphitheater was just making me more and more frustrated, so I had to do something else. Finding you was the least destructive thing I could think of."

"Glad to be your coping mechanism of choice, then."

"So the session -"

"Don't tell me," Furnace snapped. "The more I know, the more I will speculate, and the more I speculate, the worse it gets."

"Distraction?"

"Reassurance," Furnace said.

January's voice was gentle. "Do you know why I've come all this way with you? Why I didn't leave once the Railway Board stopped meeting? It's because of you.

"There are... many in my circles who, no matter how dramatic the blows they strike, cannot get anything to last. The Establishment just puts it all back together again, and they're left outside wondering what the point even was.

"But you: you have made a mark here. You have brought together people who would never otherwise stay pointed in the same direction for so many years. You have demonstrated to tens of thousands that another world is possible."

Furnace slumped. "Right now it just feels like all I've accomplished is putting the apple in the roast pig's mouth."

"This special session isn't filled with fresh London imports. These are people from your union, who learned years ago not to trust capitalists because you taught them that. They know the difference between what they had before and what they have now. They will preserve this city where you can't."

Statement: Mounteson Industries was directly involved in the creation of the New Factory.

Unanimously endorsed

Statement: The New Factory was founded for the purpose of extracting profit.

Unanimously endorsed

Statement: The New Factory is hierarchical and structured to extract value from the work of its employees, not passing on the full profit but instead funneling a significant percentage towards the owning class.

Consensus

Statement: The New Factory uses Prehistoricist knowledge on animation of bones.

Unanimously endorsed

Statement: The Factory's Prehistoricist knowledge on animation of bones was provided by Prehistoricist Tracklayers with relevant experience.

Unanimously endorsed

Statement: Cornelius of the Prehistoricists knew that Prehistoricist knowledge of bones was being used by a capitalist entity prior to the start of this inquiry.

Consensus

Statement: Cornelius of the Prehistoricists learned that Prehistoricist knowledge of bones was being used by a capitalist entity and, at minimum, took no action to stop it.

Consensus

Statement: Cornelius of the Prehistoricists encouraged the use of Prehistoricist knowledge of bones by a capitalist entity.

"Once upon a time, I imagined a city with laboratories on every corner, and streets wide enough to accommodate great beasts, and paddocks and stables for them," Cornelius said. "I received none of these things, and supporters only a thin scattering across the ground. Even Bone City only tolerates the tinkering; most neighborhoods there don't even care."

"So why didn't you just start a new community?" Spikeville's representative said. (And of course they would think that way: Spikeville itself had budded off the side of a too-populated Rail Camp.) "That's what the community system is for."

Libera spoke up. "If it's just about the buildings, there's that one place on the Hellward end where like ten buildings came collapsed, right?"

"That's not what -" Cornelius pulled his feet up onto the chair he was sitting in. "What I mean is, the Factory people told me they knew how to help me."

"You wanted the work to already be done for you," Riverhead's representative said. "You didn't want to build a community for your people, you wanted one to already exist so you could steal it and take all the credit -"

"Riverhead, please!" "What the hell?" issued from multiple places in the assembly. A moment later, all quieted as Spikeville's representative put up a hand.

"This is a Large Governance meeting, not one of your district's Diogenes councils," Spikeville said. "Politeness would help your argument here."

Riverhead flapped a hand. "My point is. Cornelius was lazy -"

"How dare you call me lazy," Cornelius shouted, "when night after night I stared at blueprints until my eyes crossed! When I analyzed and took notes on the bodily movements of Tracklayers and told them how to optimize their work to take the fewest strenuous actions! And then I designed a way to replicate them so that humans wouldn't have to! Unless you're one of those types that believe in the nobility of work, in which case go to hell."

Riverhead shook their head slowly, but said nothing else.

Silverdale's representative, the elder Tracklayer, raised their hand. "I think what Riverhead was saying is that not everyone is good at every part of leadership. Back when the Union was headed by both Cornelius and Furnace, it was Cornelius with the vision and Furnace who took care of the practicalities. Without someone to take care of the practicalities, Cornelius has been rendered rootless."

Mushroom Town picked up from there. "So when someone offered him the opportunity to skip having to do the organizing, he took it."

For all the Determined Writer had talked about equality and working with others, on the second day of soreness he realized:

His job was still one where he handed out wisdom to others, and they did what he said.

True, there was no longer any compulsion. True, being a lecturer meant his position was now fundamentally advisory. True, he no longer received any extra pay or privileges. But he had somehow still made himself socially dominant.

There was one person he knew he could always ask about this.

"Hi," the Determined Writer said, entering Furnace's room. "How are you holding up?"

"Honestly? Awful," she said. "You?"

"It gave me some things to think about." The Writer leaned against the wall. "Hypothetically - how would one go about dismantling a sense of superiority that, frustratingly, is actually earned?"

Furnace clasped her hands. "Well, there's a whole lot January might say about complexes or whatever, but I think the best place to start is to not be superior. There's got to be something you're bad at. So work on the crews. Force yourself to listen and practice and don't try to 'improve' on things, because they know better than you how to do the job."

The Writer was listening intently.

"This isn't hypothetical," Furnace said. It wasn't a question.

"It's not," the Writer said. "What am I supposed to do, then? Learn to break rocks?"

"Something like that, yes."

"As to you - is there anything I can do to help you?"

"You already have. By giving me someone else's problem to think about, rather than my own."

Cornelius' shouting was muffled by his bandages. "So when Furnace makes a deal with the Creditor to shortcut building the City that's fine! But when I make a deal with investors so I can get straight to the design and vision, I'm a danger to your way of life? What's the difference?"

Silverdale's representative said, "I think you've lost track of the purpose of these things. The purpose was to liberate us, to make us not have to work. Not to indulge your intellectual curiosity. Not to make extracting labor from us easier and more efficient. Do you want to free people, Cornelius? Or do you only want to free skeletons?"

Statement: A citizen of the City has the duty to uphold the principles upon which this City was founded.

Unanimously endorsed

Statement: Cornelius knew he was bringing capitalists inside the bounds of the City, facilitating behavior on their part that actively undermines the City's founding principles.

Unanimously endorsed

Statement: People who disagree with the fundamental vision here of a society not run by capitalists may leave and go live somewhere else. No punitive actions will be taken against them.

Unanimously endorsed

"So what about the bribing?" asked Libera. "The easiest way to prevent this would be to ban outside goods, but I don't know if we can do that."

The representative from the Factory's neighborhood said, "Entirely outlawing the use of goods from outside the City is absurd. What about clothing and objects specific to one's religion, such as rosaries or caps? What about wedding rings and lock-of-hair jewelry? What about trinkets that were given by deceased relatives?"

I can see how keeping a deceased parent's urn on a shelf hurts nobody, signed Deaf Quarter, and using a nice teapot in your room that was passed down through your family line is ultimately harmless. But only wearing sumptuous ivory gowns and ermine stoles because you were bequeathed a royal closet is much too far in the other direction. Where are we going to draw the line?

Riverhead said, "People are always going to chase status in one way or another. You can't stop that. You can channel the impulse somewhere productive, maybe, but you can't stop it."

Statement: Workers in good standing, who consistently continue to cover their shifts, are allowed to use their spare time to take the hour's walk to Burrow-Infra-Mump and the Railway station, so that they can visit others elsewhere in the Neath. This has always been true.

Unanimously endorsed

Statement: Under no circumstances can people trade having to do their work shifts or other basic duties for luxury goods. This is considered bribery and will be prosecuted and punished accordingly.

Unanimously endorsed

Statement: Under no circumstances can people be prevented from receiving their basic allowances of food, clothing, shelter, and medical care due to them being unable to pay some sort of fee. Erecting any barrier of this kind is considered corruption and will be prosecuted and punished accordingly.

Unanimously endorsed

Proposal: Luxury items received from outside the City may be used personally. This should be passed by Large Governance because it is already de facto true in many cases, such as people bringing their own religious items, personal jewelry, and foodstuffs, and is essentially impossible to enforce without unacceptably invasive monitoring.

Tabled for submission to Large Governance

Proposal: Luxury items should not be flaunted in public. For example, one may wear a brass wedding band in public, but not a golden wedding band with a large expensive gemstone set in it. This Special Session averages neutral to negative on this topic but is proposing it to Large Governance for completeness' sake.

Tabled for submission to Large Governance

Proposal: Luxury items received from outside the City may be given as gifts. This is likewise something that cannot be outlawed without unacceptably invasive monitoring.

Tabled for submission to Large Governance

Proposal: Luxury items received from outside the City may be exchanged for other goods and services done in one's own time. This is not technically impossible to outlaw, but outlawing it will create a black market that is nearly impossible to eradicate.

Tabled for submission to Large Governance

Proposal: Workers in good standing, who consistently continue to cover their shifts, may spend their spare time to take the hour's walk to Burrow-Infra-Mump and its Railway station to do work and buy luxury items there for later use here. This special session is neutral on the issue but believes clarification to be necessary.

Tabled for submission to Large Governance

Statement: It is recommended that workplaces, groups, etc. introduce some sort of nominal social reward for high performance, so recognition- and competition-driven people have incentive to do well.

Majority

"We've wandered too far off topic," said the representative of Libera, the young one. "We were supposed to be talking about the New Factory. Are we going to outlaw it or not?"

Statement: The capitalists of the New Factory are hereby given notice to stop extracting profit and leave the city. If this is not followed, further and more drastic actions may be approved.

Unanimously endorsed

A group of people were paving the road between the City and Burrow-Infra-Mump. The Writer had steadfastly refused to authorize a spur line, citing not wanting London to be close, but the ruts slowly being worn in by carts made it clear that the road could not just be dirt.

Widening out unreasonably small footpaths into roads left an enormous amount of aggregate in that silver-speckled gray stone the City was built of. The choice was to either leave heaps of it lying around, or - as this group had decided - use the City's own stone to lay a road to itself.

But, as the Writer found when he got to the part under construction, a high-quality gravel road wasn't just a matter of pouring gravel on the ground. One excavated two handspans deep and filled this trench with progressively finer types of stone, from fist-sized on down, the topmost of which was tiny chips and sand.

"This is a water filter," the Writer said, seeing this. "You're building a water filter."

An Imposing Hauler looked unimpressed. "Can your water filter support tens of thousands of wagon wheels over a distance of several miles for years at a time?"

The Writer was silent.

The Imposing Hauler crossed his arms. "Yeah, thought so."

"Why aren't you laying the surface perfectly horizontal?"

"If the surface was plumb straight, water would puddle on it. This way it runs off."

Oh. The Writer hadn't thought of that.

(The City had gutters and grates to send the very occasional rainfall out the sewer outlet. This would be a terrible system if rain was more common or the system wasn't as well-built, but they only ever got rained on two or three times a year.)

The Imposing Hauler said, "So you gonna help or what?"

The Writer awkwardly rolled up his sleeves. "Um... yes. I want to help, I think."

The Imposing Hauler put his hands on his hips. "Don't 'I think' me like that. Shout 'I will!' with your belly!"

Everyone was looking at the Writer now. He stuttered. "Aha - ha - okay, um, I guess, I will!"

"Great! Now grab a shovel and get digging."

The Writer did.

Meanwhile, Furnace had run out the time she could take without work shifts, and had to do something.

She decided to go back to the firehouse, where she assumed she would be allowed to just stare out the window without having to interact with anyone, considering that the job required nothing more.

Her coworkers didn't let her, of course.

"See, I thought you'd be in the Special Session," one of them said.

Furnace said, "One of the parties involved is someone who... I once worked with, until he hurt me very badly. I could not preside over a discussion that involved him and I certainly could not sentence him."

"It sounds like how I sometimes still think about my ex-husband," another one cut in. "After what has occurred you cannot possibly have him in your life, and yet you are in pain about the fact that he can't be. If you had to choose between saving him and saving others you would save him unthinkingly, but then you are reminded of how much he hurt you and you despise that your heart would betray you like that."

Furnace winced. "It was not romantic. But otherwise you're not wrong."

"Come on, let's get your mind off things. We have exercise equipment in the back."

The Determined Writer woke up to the sheets on the Gracile Agent's bed being rumpled. Apparently she had snuck in after he was already asleep, napped, and then took off before he woke up. She hadn't left a note, either.

He studied the wrinkles in the sheets for a long time. He'd thought maybe the patterns of the folds were the note she might have left him, and he was usually good at cryptanalysis, but despite trying every angle of attack he could think of, he found nothing.

Maybe the lack of message was the message. If so, he didn't know what that was: but it clearly didn't mean anything good.

The fact that the Special Session had not specified a day for the Factory to vacate by was turning out to be a very poor decision.

By this point the Special Session had abandoned any pretense of being a trial or an inquest. They were required to spend six hours a day in this room whether they actually used it on deliberation or not, they were not, and so the atmosphere had devolved into that of a train stopped on the tracks by fallen debris. People gathered in small clusters, socializing; others ate or slept or did mending.

Three days later, after the roll call was taken, the Riverhead representative stood up. "I have had enough of this waste of my time. Clearly the Factory has absolutely no intention to leave, and whatever grace period you've left to them is just letting them carry on business as usual. We need to take the fight to them."

The Deaf Quarter's representative added agreement: Yes. Taking the time of this many interpreters has been spreading our resources thin. I move that we create a use of force authorization.

Spikeville said, "Use of proportionate force. We are not sending in strikebreakers."

"Rather the opposite, really," Uniontown commented.

Nervous laughter.

Spikeville continued: "So, who are we appointing as commander?"

"January," said Dark District. "She has an unwavering faith in our enterprise, the intellect to plan well, and given the strength of her principles will not turn against us."

A few other proposals were suggested - the Determined Writer, Furnace, even a former military commander - but the discussion kept circling back to January, so after two hours that was what they passed.

They sent someone to find her.

Statement: January of the Calendar Council is hereby authorized to use proportionate force to remove the New Factory capitalists and re-occupy the grounds.

Consensus

Early the next morning, volunteers came together in a courtyard that was not immediately being used. Courtyards were too small for a crowd this size. They spilled outwards and upwards, to balconies and mezzanines.

January stood on top of a table. She did not have anything with her to project her voice. She did not need any.

"Today, we fight inside our own city," January said. "This is something we must never take lightly. Remember that this action is only a few steps away from a state using force on its own citizens. Remember that this action is only a few steps away from tyranny of the majority.

"To use force against our own is anathema. That is why you have been asked to bring no weapons. We will enter, secure all entry and exit points with barricades, and search the entire facility.

"Tell anyone you see that they are allowed to leave so long as they are only carrying their own things. Detain anyone who is trying to get inside for any reason, or anyone who responds with violence; you will be provided weighted throwing-nets to do this with. Physically block any attempt to remove bones or skeletons. They may have guns, and if so you are to use limb-trapper poles to disable and disarm them. Remember, this is the Neath, and so death is temporary. Stand against gunfire and do not give them the satisfaction of seeing you break and run. If there is an actual army you will be given weapons, but not before.

"The goal here is not to defeat an enemy. It is to defend our home and our way of life. Agreed?"

And a shout came up from the assembled, and they began - despite January's words - to march.

The New Factory's overseers knew they would be seeing something like this. The proceedings of the special session were public, after all. They just weren't prepared for the scale of it.

They were expecting a raid from an analogue to the Constables - maybe twenty men and their guns. They weren't prepared to be stormed by well over two hundred, and they certainly weren't prepared to be strung up in nets like fish.

Guns were physically wrested from the hands of the people who wielded them. A few City volunteers ended up with serious or temporarily fatal gunshot wounds, but no bodies were physically damaged in a way that would prevent Neath-resurrection.

(The victims were sent off to a nearby gymnasium that had been commandeered to serve as an impromptu field hospital/temporary morgue. The Writer did his best to get wounds cleaned and fixed, but on occasion the odds were bad enough that he had to grit his teeth and slit someone's throat so that resurrection would happen instead.)

At some point during the occupation of the building, they came across a broom closet that smelled of rot.

A body. Two gunshot wounds. One of them was directly through the hand, as if she had grabbed at the assailant's weapon; the other shot was in the chest.

Upon seeing the body being carried into the field hospital and put directly into the half of the room that was a morgue, the Determined Writer glanced up, swallowed, then went back to work. Once he was done with his task, he identified the body to the others as his partner.

They tried to let him off after that.

"No," the Writer said. "Right now, there are other people who need help. I'll cry when I'm done."

(He didn't. Instead, he went back to his room, stared at the ceiling, and remembered playing chess with the Boatman who plied the shores of death. Remembered asking what would happen if someone didn't want to come back. Remembered not receiving an answer.)

In the end, the bosses surrendered. They didn't have the infrastructure or a state to back them up, so any threats they might have made were impotent. If ever the Union members thought bosses were cowards, this certainly confirmed it.

The Special Session then moved on to sentencing.

The people who came to the City solely to be management had everything other than the clothes on their backs confiscated from them, and were then permanently exiled. (They had connections outside. They'd be fine.)

Any further shipments of bones from Moulin would be turned away until further notice, under the theory that the Mountesons were the ones who had arranged for the shipments and thus profiting from them would draw ire they couldn't afford to draw.

All existing contents of the Factory were to be retrofitted and modified for use in the City itself; this was also the community service that the employee-Prehistoricists were sentenced to, under the theory that the ones who had become employees had done so under what were essentially false pretenses.

There were also a few Prehistoricists who had taken positions as petty lords. They were given the choice of either one year where half of their work needed to be physical labor, or exile. (The nominal sentence was comparatively light, because their real punishment was the natural consequence of forever having a reputation as collaborators: a reputation that would kneecap their social standing permanently.) Three chose to leave. The other one chose, after a long conversation with the Writer about what he actually wanted, to supplement this hard labor with extensive counseling in social skills. (He would subsequently assist in organizing groups for other people who found it difficult to connect with others, something that the Writer admitted in hindsight should have been done much sooner.)

As to Cornelius -

They weren't holding Cornelius in a locked room. They weren't holding Cornelius in a locked anything, really. He was just sitting on a bed, in a room off at the edge of Uniontown, where the windows looked out at the wastes of Moulin.

"Hello," the Determined Writer said, opening the door.

"Kick me out already." Cornelius sat hunched over, staring at the floor. "Clearly your people don't want me around."

"Why haven't you already left, then?" asked the Writer. He opened the door again and indicated the handle. "Door's been open the whole time. You didn't use any scrip from whatever the New Factory paid you to buy a ticket out while the Special Session was going on. We wouldn't have pursued you or anything - if nothing else, Furnace would probably kill me if I tried."

Cornelius let out something that was either a choked laugh or an extended scoff.

"You could have just told me you wanted help setting something up. I would have. You didn't need to bring in a bunch of people everyone would hate."

"I didn't because you'd rather lead them yourself. You think you know better than everyone about everything."

The Writer winced. "I know. I'm working on it."

"So what are you actually here for, then?"

"Your sentence is to remake the skeletons to help the City, and I'm supposed to advise you on that. But I also have some personal advice for you."

"What is it?"

"What you did to Furnace Ancona is something that hurt her so deeply that she will never accept a mere apology for it. If you want to be on speaking terms with her ever again, you need to give her more than an apology. You need to fix it."

The Determined Writer woke suddenly to find the Gracile Agent in her bed, bewildered.

The Writer rushed to her side. "You're all right! You're all right."

"...I failed," the Agent said, closing her eyes.

"January occupied the factory and everything is fine now. But -" Things he'd been wanting to say for weeks tumbled out of his mouth. "Murder, even targeted and temporary, was never the answer. If the Mountesons had seen one of theirs assassinated they would have sent more, and guards. It would have accomplished nothing."

The Agent looked down. "I know."

"Then why did you do it?"

"I had to do something. Anything. Sitting here helpless was driving me insane. At least if I was moving I wouldn't be useless."

"You know what? No. You can't keep doing this to me, going on these horrifically dangerous missions or injuring yourself trying to fix the city or damn near starving yourself to death to do something that, in hindsight, the Solicitor-Baroness could have done perfectly well! Why are you so desperate to sacrifice yourself?"

"I can't just not do anything while the world is like this!"

"You have been doing self-destructive things for a very long time," the Writer said, "and I thought it was just your conscience driving you. But now I have to ask: why are you so desperate to justify your existence?"

"Because otherwise I'm just worthless! The City said so! I can't do anything here!"

"You are already worth something to me. You don't need to keep proving you're allowed to exist. You're allowed to exist because you're yourself."

The Agent curled up into a ball.

"...I think I would feel better, given what's happened, if you were with Care right now. Please?"

The Agent lay unmoving.

But the Writer's arms were strong now, muscular from experience with the shovel and wheelbarrow, and so he picked her up and carried her there.

While on an idle walk through the city, Furnace turned a corner and saw a statue of herself.

(Furnace had done her best to discourage statues of herself. Worshiping someone who was still alive never sat well with her, and herself even less. But she'd also not asked for a decree against it, because that would be an exception made for her specifically, and making exceptions for anyone specifically was forbidden.)

But this one statue was different from so many others she'd seen. She wasn't standing tall, or working; instead she was laid out on the ground as another Tracklayer secured a splint around her foot. Her muscles were chiseled taut with pain, her fists tight against her sides.

Furnace drew closer, and read the plaque underneath it:

Another Kind of Strength

The accident had shattered her memory of that day on the Moloch Line into vignettes of pain: the moment of seeing the bundle of rail ties drop, the blinding white pain intensifying further when it was moved off her foot, instructing the others through gritted teeth that the boot needed to be removed so her foot didn't get trapped inside by swelling, work resuming right behind her as if nothing had happened even as she was hauled away on a stretcher to receive proper treatment.

(She hadn't even known that having nightmares for years afterwards was something that could be helped. Not until recently. One learned certain things by going mad.)

A stone boot, sculpted laces still intact despite the fact that the boot had been cut apart with shears, sat on the floor beside it. But when she examined it more closely the laces had been rendered peculiarly. Instead of all neatly criss-crossing, some went in and came out the same side, and occasionally an eyelet was skipped entirely: a message in the Language of Laces that the Revolutionaries of London used.

"Do you like it?" said someone who had emerged from beside her.

She turned to look at them. "It made me think," she said, "and it is beautifully rendered. Did you make it?"

They looked at the ground. "Yes, it's mine - what don't you like? The scene? The stone I used? It being so prominent? I can have it moved."

Furnace shook her head. "No, it's just that the memory is painful to me. What do these laces mean?"

"Davidson. The name of the boss who was on duty at the time."

A detail that the sculptor had remembered, even though Furnace hadn't.

Furnace made a fist with her hand once again. "Thank you for remembering not just the heroism, but the reason why the heroism was necessary."

The sculptor then said that the other boot encoded an unprintable word. "Just to make sure future viewers know why the name's there."

Furnace laughed.

"You said your partner was suicidal and we needed to keep her constantly supervised," January said. "But she hasn't moved an inch from the way she came here curled up. So why did you bring her?"

The Writer spun a bangle around his wrist. "She keeps putting herself in situations that could easily result in her insanity or death. Once, her reasons made sense, and the risks she took were at least considered. But now they're becoming less and less coherent. This last time with the Factory, she admitted to my face that she was doing something she knew wouldn't even work."

"She's dedicated."

"She's reckless," the Writer said. "You are a general. Do you not understand the value of your men?"

January was silent for a very long time.

Eventually she turned away. Her voice was a whisper. "At the very beginning, when I had just been fired as Benthic's scapegoat, I was so angry that I did not much care what burned, only that it did. Eventually, someone found me, and taught me how to focus that anger on the ones who deserved it. He taught me to keep my eyes always fixed to the Masters, and above them, the stars. For him I wielded poison and pistol, and obliterated what little sense of self I might once have had."

The Writer nodded, slowly. Nobody on the Calendar Council got there bloodlessly. Even September, the one who did little other than lecture, had thrown men from the Ministry of Public Decency off rooftops and drowned constables in the river that had once been the Thames.

January continued. "London is a brutal city, and so it creates a hundred desperate new revolutionaries every month. In those conditions, the footsoldiers do not matter, for there will always be more. I was taught not to care how many of them were blown up, caught in the fires they set, brained by neddy-men. London's industrialists fed many times more bodies to the meatgrinder than any of us would ever be able to, so no matter what we did we had the moral high ground."

The Writer said nothing; only let this all wash over him as if he was standing underneath a sewage outlet.

January took a long, ragged breath. "And then I was on your board, and I met Furnace Ancona. I envied her spirit. I couldn't figure out how a Revolutionary-aligned person could genuinely connect with so many people in a world where kindness would always be answered by brutality. She had a vindictive streak when she was mistreated, certainly, but you - somehow - weren't mistreating her. And so she - somehow - was helping you build something more.

"Then, when the Railway made it to the Hurlers, while you spent all that time learning about diamond hearts, I wandered the wastes. And then I fell through a patch of rotten ice over what I had not realized was a lake -

"- and realized that I had been doing everything wrong.

"There weren't people there who hauled my unconscious body out of the icy water. They hadn't brought me to a castle, because there was no way such a place could exist so far into the deep frozen wastes. There was no bed I woke up in, dry, with hot water bottles around me, and I was not fed warm and nourishing things. I did not spend weeks slowly healing from hypothermia and frostbite. There couldn't have been people there who added depth and nuance to my new thoughts by telling me about how anger and madness intersected, and there was no possible way so many people would care so much about someone they had never met before with no expectation of reward.

"So much generosity was inconceivable to me. Obviously, I had frozen to death under the ice, and had merely had a particularly odd trip on the slow boat."

"But there I was, at the Hurlers railway station, in an entirely different set of coats than what I had left home in."

"...Oh," the Writer said. "And here I was thinking that madness was just an intellectual interest of yours."

January said, "The anarchists of London are blindly angry, unthinkingly reenacting all the brutality that has been visited upon them. They are being vicious to a vicious world, and their violence begets violence, and so that was the kind of person I was.

"I didn't know how to value anyone else, but I didn't know how to value myself, either. I'm still learning."

The Writer said, "...I never knew."

January turned her face away. "I didn't let you know. I'm choosing to trust you, now."

The Determined Writer sat there for a long time.

January asked, "Is your partner the same?"

The Writer said, "She thinks she needs to justify her right to exist."

"Oh, that one's common."

"Not like that. She said the City itself told her that she wasn't suited for anything here."

"That just means we'll have to come up with a new job she is suited for."

Another day or two later, January pulled the Writer aside again. "You need to do better too."

"At...?" the Writer said.

January put a hand on her hip. "You need to show that you cherish and care about your partner when she isn't ill or injured. Bring her breakfast in bed sometimes. Offer more of whatever sort of physical touch is appropriate to your relationship. Better synchronize your off days so you can spend time together. That sort of thing. Don't make her ask or wait until she 'needs' it. Otherwise you're implicitly rewarding her for... recklessness."

"Oh."

January stared pointedly. "Is that a yes or a no?"

"I'll try to do better."

"You will do better."

"...I will."

Despite Large Governance's procrastination and Furnace's private disapproval, a secondary market was emerging for things people did on their own time that weren't important enough for the City to count them as work shifts - things like hairdressing, portable artwork, private lessons - to be exchanged for each other and luxury goods. Similarly, trinkets and City-stone figurines were hawked to tourists for moon-pearls and jade fragments. After it became clear that this wouldn't go away, Furnace had made an unofficial declaration politely asking that such enterprises always leave at least one-third free to fellow citizens who didn't want to pay secondary currency. (It remained unofficial because a Large Governance ruling would not help. Gray markets became black when one tried to enforce such things.)

The workshop-laboratories of the Prehistoricists (which, it turned out, could actually use those twelve-foot ceilings) were always open for anyone to use the equipment, ask the more experienced people how to do things, and use nominal amounts of basic reagents. Those who could acquire bones were expected to bring extra for the stockpile. However, particularly large and exotic things had to be brought by the participants themselves.

January would never stand for the educational circuit ever accepting anything that even faintly resembled money, not even tips. So it was, and so it remained.

These days, the Tracklayer's Union office was largely ceremonial: Furnace had successfully devolved almost all of her power. But the office still served as the workplace address for jobs that roamed across the boundaries of communities, so it was still good for someone to show up there and read the mail.

Which is how she found a letter from Cornelius, forwarded from her first original address:

Dear Furnace,

I used the Discordance in a way that disfigured you, against your desires and without your permission. There is no excuse I can make, and there needs to be more than an apology. So I am giving you more than an apology.

I have been working with a Midnighter with knowledge of the Discordance. She believes she may have a way to reverse what happened to us, with application of irrigo.

I want to forget that I ever studied the Discordance, and the Midnighter believes she can take this knowledge away, but it will remove my memory of that period of my life entirely.

You will be able to lose the faces I forced upon you. It is your choice whether you wish to undergo the process fully clad in irrigo to forget that all of this ever happened, only take irrigo in the back faces and retain your knowledge of what I did, or remain triplicate.

However, you must choose soon. The Midnighter believes that, if your faces are to be removed, we must both be there and cognizant. I did this to you and thus I must be present when it is undone.

With utmost hope,

Cornelius

Furnace's hands shook, and she carefully folded the letter back up and put it into a pocket.

She went through the rest of the mail without any further incident, but the letter in her pocket felt like a hot coal the entire time.

Furnace asked the Determined Writer.

The Writer leaned back in his chair. "You told me, a long time ago over drinks, that one day when this was all over you wanted to go back to just the one face. Do you still agree with your past self?"

Furnace asked the Gracile Agent.

"As far as I'm concerned it's not a question," the Agent said. "You wear that helmet to hide your faces, meaning you don't want them to be seen. And even if you remove them, you can still wear your helmet if you want. It'll just be a choice, then, rather than a necessity."

Furnace asked January.

"I think," January said, "you should ask your faces what they want."

Furnace sat alone in a room. She asked herself and herself, "Do you want to be removed?"

"You don't need me anymore," one said. "Your city teems with life. You know that others understand and support your role, whatever it may become."

"My purpose is complete," the other said. "You have found other people who will keep you safe, who will help you carry the burden of the great work."

"Thank you," Furnace said, quietly. "I don't want to forget what you have done for me. I will live for you both."

I want to have them taken, Furnace wrote in her response to Cornelius, but I want to remember what happened.

A date was set.

The Midnighter that Cornelius had booked arrived at the train station wearing traditional mourning black, knuckles white on the handles of two enormous pieces of luggage.

The Determined Writer strode up to the platform and extended a hand. "Director of the Great Hellbound Railway, at your service."

Furnace followed. "I'm Furnace Ancona from the Tracklayer's Union."

"You may call me Steward," the Midnighter said, shaking hands in turn.

The Writer took up one of the pieces of luggage, and Furnace the other, and all three walked. The road was smooth, with no large rocks to trip over: the Writer smiled, a little, to be using his own work.

"My condolences on your loss," Furnace said, eventually.

"I'm not going to need accommodation on account of my feelings," Steward said, quietly. "The work is more important."

"We don't believe in making that kind of tradeoff," Furnace said. "We can put you up and let you collect yourself for a while first, if you need it. Cornelius might be displeased by putting this off longer, but what you will be doing is work better done by steady hands."

"I know you do work shifts. I do not wish to impose any longer than is necessary."

"What you will do for us is work. It is highly unusual and specialized work, but it is work."

The Writer glanced over. "In the meantime, there are plenty of jobs that you can do that are lighter and more calming."

"...I trained as an accountant, once," said Steward. "Give me some bookkeeping."

Furnace met with Steward as early as possible the next morning, to say: "Since you are a Midnighter, there are some additional rules you must follow. We here do not take kindly to the alteration of memories. The use of irrigo outside of pre-scheduled circumstances is forbidden, regardless of consent of both parties. We do not use irrigo in psychotherapy under any circumstances. Finally, use of irrigo for personal gain is grounds for immediate expulsion. Do you understand?"

Steward nodded. "Your city, your rules."

"They're not my rules," Furnace protested. "It's because Large Governance collaboratively decided that the possibility of coercion using irrigo is just too dangerous."

"Speaking of dangerous, how are you going to ensure that my luggage and its contents will remain safe when I'm not here?"

"Oh! Did they not give you the keys?" Furnace looked in a wall cabinet. "Aha, here it is."

"Oh, this is a nice lock." The Steward had bent down to examine the key and the cylinder. "And here I was thinking you folk didn't know any better."

"I believe someone in this courtyard was trained as a locksmith? Or maybe it was in the next courtyard, I'm not sure. Either way, don't lose them. There aren't any spares."

"Thank you. They're beautiful."

"On a more personal note - there are grief counseling groups here. It might help you to be around other people who understand."

"No - not now -" Steward stuttered.

"Not going is fine too. Still, the offer's open."

"This is for you," January said to Furnace, a day after. She handed Furnace something wrapped in fabric.

Furnace unfolded the fabric. In it was a half masquerade mask, one that covered the general area around the eyes, in a plain, unremarkable beige that was intended for skin lighter than Furnace's.

Furnace turned it over. There was a piece of paper covering the back.

"Don't touch that until it's time," January said. "Underneath the paper is a layer of glue that you can press onto your face, which will stay adhered for a day or so. Around the eyes on the inside is painted a ring of violant, to make sure that even if someone tries to put you under the irrigo veil you will remember at least some of what went on. As a bonus, it burns easily and the ash is fully inert."

Furnace tried to offer it back. "But I'm not even a Liberationist -"

January put up a hand to stop her. "I know I support a slightly different cause, but we Revs can't afford to devour each other alive before the Constables ever get to us. There's just not enough of us."

"Thank you. Not just for this. For everything."

There was a smile in January's voice. "Don't worry about it."

Steward came to Furnace ten days after arriving. "Unless you have major objections, we start at 6 in the morning tomorrow."

"What kind of bookkeeping have you been doing?" Furnace asked.

Steward startled. "You remembered?"

"Of course I did," Furnace said. "That's my job."

"I've been helping balance food storage. Consumption rates and all that. It feels... good to help people."

"So what do you think of the place?"

"This city is far more organized than I expected. London's newspapers say that everyone can take whatever they want from others because you don't have the concept of ownership."

Furnace automatically rattled off an explanation she'd given dozens of times before: "We do hold some types of items in common rather than owning them - but even for those things theft is still theft, because people are using them, and you don't take something someone else is using."

Steward laughed softly. "Exactly what I mean. Well! I'll see you tomorrow morning."

The morning of, after dressing herself, Furnace considered the mask on her nightstand. She didn't have to wear it. She could just leave it here, and a few days or weeks later give it back to January.

Cornelius could have undergone irrigo without her and left her three-faced in perpetuity. But he'd let her choose. So if she put on the mask, it would not be against him.

But the other variable, this one far more dangerous, was Steward. A Midnighter's entire career was based upon doing a deed that she found terrifying, and she did not need any more gaps in her memory than she already had.

She removed the mask's paper backing and smoothed it on. Immediately the world felt sharper, crisp-edged, like clear cold air. A single corduroy trouser-leg spilled out of the basket onto the floor. The stone floor had subtle patterns that prevented slipping. Her nightstand had had one of the legs shimmed with a folded piece of paper so it wouldn't wobble.

She left her room. The lamps were still off for the night, but in her courtyard little glowing pebbles had been carefully glued into the niches between bricks for soft light. She'd seen them before, but with violant-rimmed vision, the peculiar gridlike appearance they gave the walls was like a constellation of new stars.

Here: a detour through the center of a courtyard because a set of stone stairs was being quarried out to turn it into a ramp. "Sorry about the dust!" was written, crookedly, in grease-pencil on a man-sized amber spire.

There: one of the great landmarks. There were no great buildings - almost every single one was the same height - but above them all rose enormous towers of swirled amber and stone that served for navigation. Those had come with the city, but lately people had started decorating as far up as they could reach with flags and paint.

The city wasn't the empty claustrophobic dark slate that had driven her to despair anymore. Everywhere she looked - everything she saw - was people making it their own.

Finally, Furnace went through an unmarked door and came to where everything would end.

She lifted her helmet off and put it in a corner, then stared at it. She had been carrying its weight on her shoulders for so long - and maybe now she wouldn't have to. The Determined Writer would have said that was a metaphor, or something. She smiled faintly at the thought.

Steward arrived next, carrying an enormous case that looked like it was for a musical instrument, as well as a mirrorcatch box. She glanced around the room, and then a moment later snapped her head back up and stared at Furnace more intently. If she saw anything odd about Furnace (or Furnace's wearing of a mask), though, she did not comment and turned away.

Setting both pieces down, pushing the mirrorcatch box to the side, and unlatching the case, the Steward slowly and reverently withdrew something.

It was an enormous ceramic diorama of a man praying inside an arch, the size of the Steward's own torso, all glazed white - save for a wrapping around the man that was difficult to look at.

It glowed, faintly, in a way that made Furnace's eyes want to slide away. But the violant around the edges of her vision caught her eyes, held them, forced her perception back towards it.

Irrigo.

The color of forgetting.

Steward locked the case shut again, then stacked the Shrine on top of it, using the case as a pedestal. "Count yourself lucky to see a Shrine to Saint Joshua," she said to Furnace. "It's almost never seen outside the Profession."

Furnace and Steward waited, in two of the three chairs available, for Cornelius to arrive.

Half an hour of silent sitting later:

"Oh - am I late?" Cornelius said.

"No such thing as too late," Steward said. "Not for something like this."

Furnace had thought that Cornelius came back from the dead in tomb-colonist's bandages because of some unhealable injury. But now he silently unwound the bandages, revealing that he was disfigured by dozens of tiny mouths scattered across his skin like boils.

Furnace breathed, "You never told me."

"You stopped speaking to me." As Cornelius spoke, instead of it coming from his main mouth, his other mouths joined in and dropped out. "And even when I tried to reach out, you..." Cornelius gestured helplessly. "So after a while I stopped trying. You clearly didn't want to know, so I never told you."

"I broke, you know," Furnace said quietly. "For a long time afterwards, I didn't even have a myself - my left and right faces headed the Union, and my own desires had been obliterated. And then, with this City..." Furnace looked down. "And now it's the end, and you're going to forget all of this, and -"

"It's not the end," Cornelius said. "I'll still be there."

"You won't remember. You'll think I was avoiding you because I was selfish, not..." Furnace stopped; started again. "I don't want you trying to restart things, thinking that I was terrible to you for no reason."

Steward looked up. "I can cut around that part. I can leave the knowledge that you said something that deeply hurt her, and why you said it. You just won't know about the Discordance part. It's more dangerous than pulling out the whole memory, but so is leaving you two with a relational mismatch this wide."

"I'll agree to that," Cornelius said, finally, holding his knees to his chest. "Is there anything else you wanted to say, Bea?"

"Furnace."

"Anything else, Furnace?"

And that, too, set off a thousand incoherent fragments of questions from years before. Why he hid the mouths, whether he felt regret when he saw her, what if, was it true, did he really. But one was pressing before all the others.

"Why now?" Furnace said. "Why didn't you ask me if I wanted it fixed before?"

"Because you were suffering," Cornelius said. "Because you had so many other things to work through. I think I like you better this way, though. As someone who knows that sometimes she needs to stop and step back. As someone who can ask for help."

And she wanted to protest that she didn't do it for him, but it was true, wasn't it? That things were better now?

She still remembered snapping and screaming at him. She would certainly never have entertained this offer in that state.

"I'm glad I'm better too." Furnace looked away. "I won't ask anything further. Steward, do the honors."

The Steward pulled an irrigo veil from inside the statue, wound it around Cornelius' face, and flipped apart the latch on the mirrorcatch box.

By the time Furnace realized that the box did not contain irrigo, but instead viric - the color of dreams - it was too late for her to look away.

(Behind her, Steward wrapped an irrigo veil between Cornelius' face, her own, and Furnace's back faces. She opened a well-thumbed book to a page that had long since cracked the spine with familiarity, and began to read.)

(Cornelius spoke of the Deviless who had taunted him about the fact that, despite claiming to be a scholar, he couldn't read the ice-rimmed stones Furnace wanted to ignore and route around. Of a dictionary smuggled to him. Of being in the Hurlers standing amongst the stone circles, and counting and counting and counting and counting.)

(And Furnace and Furnace told him of the time she had found him collapsed on the tundra, inside a circle of standing stones, freezing to death. She brought him back inside to warm him, and had begged him to stop.)

(And now under the irrigo Cornelius confessed that he didn't stop then because he was in too deep, the Discordance felt almost within his grasp if he tried just a little more -)

(Every time one of Cornelius' mouths spoke, Steward gently closed that mouth and it disappeared.)

(Cornelius spoke of watching Furnace come to work earliest and go home last, to greet everyone as they came in and say goodbye as they left, memorizing everyone's children and grandparents, and never once mentioning her own. Furnace made herself everything to all people - brokering coalitions, doing so much to please everyone, trying to be fair to people that Cornelius would long since have left behind. Why couldn't she just see that so much more progress could be made if she just ignored the people who wouldn't understand anyway? But instead she insisted on twisting herself into knots trying to convince people who couldn't understand what she stood for, trying to get them to see something they refused to see.)

(And Cornelius had begged Furnace to think of herself for once in her life, and one day in her total refusal he saw the same desperation in her eyes as was in his when she carried him away from the Hurlers. That she thought she could convince them if she tried just a little more -)

(So he brought her to the ice, and spoke in the Discordance -

- never speak two truths with the same mouth -

- and perhaps he thought it would save her from herself, force her to think before she spoke, bind her to a rule that would make her only express her own opinion rather than trying to be everything to all people. But this would have been a terrible violation of who Furnace was. So instead she ended up with three faces, so she could have three opinions. Three minds who had the same memories, but would take other perspectives for her - the ones she herself disagreed with, but wanted to make a coalition of.)

(Cornelius too began to grow mouths; and he saw her skull warp; and he knew then that he had made a terrible mistake. So he spoke again, in words of ice he thought would undo it, not realizing that two wrongs do not make a right - and then it wasn't Cornelius there anymore, it was ice, and it wasn't Furnace there anymore, it was ice, and nothing stood looking at nothing stood looking at nothing -)

(And ironically, it was the first thing he had done to her that made sure she survived the second thing he had done to her. When that final word of Discordance froze him solid, and froze her thoughts solid, Furnace Ancona would have drifted insensate until she froze to death on the tundra. But her other faces guided her home and told her what to do. She and she found the helmet; she and she kept the Union alive; she and she watched over Furnace as she came back to herself.)

(And so the faces wouldn't agree to disappear until Cornelius himself could vow that they would never be needed again.)

(Cornelius pronounced this vow. He then asked Steward to destroy his knowledge of the Discordance, and leave only the vow behind.)

(Steward told Cornelius to repeat words that fell from her lips like ice crystals, and pressed the irrigo veil over Cornelius' face as he repeated them with breath cold as a north wind. And he closed his eyes and wept, and Steward pressed the irrigo veil into his tears and gently pronounced absolution. His face became slack.)

(Furnace and Furnace told Steward that she and she were ready to go.)

(Steward closed her and her eyes, and then there were none. Steward closed her and her mouths, and then there were none. Steward cleaned away all that remained of her and her, and the only thing left was smooth skin.)

(And finally Steward pronounced a blessing, and there was nothing.)

In viric trance Furnace Ancona wandered underneath archways of vine and rose, hearing the murmuring of a fountain, the sound of -

Her mother's voice -

She quickened her steps.

When Furnace pushed aside a curtain of ivy, though, all she saw was a gramophone playing a recording of her mother's voice, and her heart sank.

A voice from behind her. "I'm sorry. It was just the only way I could think of to make sure you would find your way here."

Furnace whirled around. "Who are you?"

"Beatrice Ancona." Beatrice gestured to a delicate chair and teapot and cups. It was here that Furnace realized that she was in what looked like a tea room, but for the fact that it filled an entire parquet hall.

Furnace sat down warily. "Right, but who are you?"

"The road not traveled," Beatrice said, pouring Furnace something that shimmered silver in the cup. "Go on, have some tea."

This one had the simple sweetness of sugar. It tasted like faith in humanity. It tasted like a parent's lullaby. It tasted like ignorant bliss. It tasted like knowing everything would be all right. It tasted like being safe. It tasted like being whole.

And Furnace drank of it, and wept, because it was what she could never have again.

"Compare that with this." And Beatrice gave her a second cup that shone copper in the light.

The taste of this one was bracingly bitter. It tasted of righteous anger, of vindication. It tasted of a powerful speech to bolster the determination. It tasted of holding strong against truncheons and hunger. It tasted of suffering and sacrifice. It tasted of principles being the last remaining bulwark between oneself and despair.

The silver one had been soft and sweet, but the copper one's complexity made anything less feel insultingly simple.

"Why can't I have both?" Furnace asked Beatrice. "Why is it that to have the one I lost the other?"

Beatrice smiled, and poured one more cup in a striking gold. "Here is a third."

This one tasted of warming spices. It tasted like the sudden realization that you survived and now had an entire life in front of you. It tasted like the breaking of a fever after an illness. It tasted like other people reaching out to you as you once did to them. It tasted like having a hug to cry into. It tasted like showing others that if you did it, they could too. It tasted like leaving the world better than you found it. It tasted like hope.

"That one," Beatrice said, "you get to keep."

Furnace groped towards consciousness. Her eyes fluttered.

"Hey," said the Gracile Agent.

Furnace mumbled, "Did - did it -"

"Feel for yourself," the Agent said, guiding one of Furnace's hands to the light coating of fuzz around the back of her head that would one day become hair.

Tears gathered in Furnace's eyes.

The Gracile Agent said, "I took time off. So I could be here when you woke up. Just like old times."

Just like old times. Just like after the...

The ragged edges in Furnace's memory caught her and -

A touch on her arm. "Hey. Hey, it's safe here."

Furnace didn't know how to say it wasn't about the safety, but her throat made a pathetic noise, and so the Agent reached over to a table with a covered bowl.

As the Agent brought a spoon to her lips, Furnace found that the bowl contained a broth that went down easily. It gave her stomach something to hold onto, and spread warmth throughout her body from there.

"Better?"

"A little. How long was I out?"

"Two days," the Agent said. "For his part, Cornelius hasn't woken up yet, and the Steward says she doesn't know yet how long it will be until he does."

(It took another three days, and Cornelius sometimes forgot who and where he was for weeks after that. The Steward said this happened when you removed so many of someone's core memories at once, and Cornelius had to stay with someone who could deal with dementia until the attacks ceased.)

Suddenly, Furnace found that she was angry: "She didn't put me under irrigo. She put me under viric."

"You were scared of having your memories tampered with, right?" the Agent said. "I saw the mask. Not sure where you got that thing, but I disposed of it for you."

The mask...!

"Don't worry, I didn't tell anyone, and nobody's listening here."

"Where's... here?"

"The place the Director and I live," the Agent said. "He's off doing some sort of business nonsense. He wanted me to come with him, but honestly, I was just too worried about you."

...Worried. About Furnace.

And Furnace should have been able to accept this, but instead what came out of her mouth was "Why would you care that much about me?"

"I don't need a 'why' to care about you. I just do."

"That doesn't make sense."

"It doesn't have to."

"I need to talk to you," Furnace said to Steward.

So Steward put down the book she was reading. "Yes?"

"Why did you use viric without warning me?" asked Furnace.

"It was the best way to keep your memory intact that I could think of," Steward said. "Confessions under the veil are sacrosanct. I am sworn to never let the secret live, and so, for professional reasons, if you were conscious, I would have had to put you under the irrigo veil. But if I put your mind elsewhere, you'd never hear the secrets, and so I wouldn't have to take them away."

Oh.

"...Thank you," Furnace eventually said.

"Speaking of. I do need to go back to London to make -" here Steward winced - "funeral arrangements. But then... then there's nothing left there for me anymore."

Furnace put a hand on Steward's knee. "I know I offered before - but maybe after all this is done, you could look at one of the grief groups."

"But - I can't - not without -" Steward pulled her hair. "Without the veil - I know I'm not supposed to use it for that, but -"

"...We don't have an irrigo addiction program exactly, but there's an ex-Midnighter in Mushroom Town who volunteered to be someone you can talk to about that."

"My god - you really do - have everything here -" Steward was starting to hyperventilate through her tears -

"Hey. Hey, can you listen to me? Tell me five things you see."

"Candle. Table. Drawer. Floor. Boots."

"Good. Can you give me four things you hear?"

"You talking." Steward paused a moment. "Children. Some sort of wheeled cart. Um... does my breathing count?"

"Close enough. Name three things you feel."

"I'm sitting on a chair." Steward said. "The floor is warm, and... I need to clean my face up. Do you have a handkerchief somewhere?"

Furnace did, and handed it to her. "If you can, try to name two things you can smell."

"Well, I can smell crying," Steward said, blowing her nose. "But... uh... not much else, given circumstances."

"That's all right. One taste."

"Salt," Steward said, immediately.

"Feel any better?"

"Is this what you learn in grief counseling?" Steward said, dabbing at her eyes.

"Not exactly," Furnace said. "I learned to deal with my own hysterics when I was mentally recovering from... let's call it wrongful imprisonment."

"Didn't think you were the type."

"I'm a union organizer," Furnace said. (It wasn't, technically, a lie.)

"Was whatever you were striking for worth it?"

"Well, I have a city now," Furnace said, smiling.

"It's a lovely city," said Steward. "Can I live here?"

"Of course."

There was, the Gracile Agent realized, one entity that could really and truly forgive her.

She took spiraling steps down to soft earth. She drank. She laid down.

Now, the City told her:

I'm sorry. I would have been gentler, if I had known that you too could fracture.

And it told her:

I said that no jobs existed for you. Not that you couldn't do anything.

And it told her:

You have seen many societies and ways of being, more than anyone else here has. You, more than anyone, can see what about this society is yet unfinished. Figure out what needs to be done that no one has realized needs doing.

And it told her:

You are not worthless. You have power. You have skill. You have value.

The Agent cried at the bottom of the shaft for a while. And then she took the steps back up, and found her partner, and cried some more.

There were immigrants from London, or elsewhere, who did not already know what a consensus was and what kind of duties a citizen had.

The Agent refined the vague process of acculturation into an introductory civics class: a small group of immigrants would meet with an instructor thrice weekly for up to two months, depending. There, they learned how to interact with City society. They would learn what kind of jobs were available, where one could live, how to participate in a consensus meeting.

The kind of Londoners who wanted to immigrate often came from backgrounds where violence was used to solve every problem, and so communication and conflict resolution became part of the curriculum.

And during this process, the Agent observed these training groups to spot those who might need extra eyes kept on them to ensure others' safety, or assistance unlearning destructive behavior like alcoholism.

The process was refined and distilled and eventually documented, and the Agent trained more instructors to take her place. They were never quite as good as her at spotting the ones who could become dangerous, but they were never going to be able to. Not without the Agent's experience.

And then when the Agent had firmly established this job, she went looking for more.

"Do come in," Furnace said to the shadow that dawdled in the doorframe.

"Hiya." September closed the door behind him. "A ken I already did ma proper visit earlier, but a wanted a talk in private."

"What is it?"

September sat down and leaned forwards, his already soft brogue even softer than usual. "Talk is that they might want tae pit you on the Calendar Council, as March. If they did, you'd huv access not jus' to the full resources of the Council, but ye could also create dozens more revolutions. What'd'ye think?"

Furnace imagined settlements with her new mode of government, this consensus model, scattering like jewels across the Neath. Collectives at the edge of Ealing Gardens, land at Balmoral, perhaps even across the deep Zee.

But - that wasn't what the Calendar Council would ask of her. They would allow and perhaps even support new towns, certainly. But she had long since put together what January said about Liberation when unguarded, the way September talked about his position being precarious because he wasn't radical enough, the way April had destroyed her hearing and very nearly her life manufacturing bombs.

March of the Calendar Council wouldn't be a mentor. She would be a general.

Furnace shook her head. "I'm sorry, I can't. I care too much about this city, and I've been told that it could be dangerous to my health to do more."

(And perhaps her answer would have been different if she had been asked when she was younger, when she had been leading strikes against the Director of the Railway rather than working with him, when she still remembered the vindictive pride of locking Mr. Fires into a closet, when she hadn't yet realized that she was not unassailable. But now she had a place to protect and foster, and people who cared about her and wanted her to be happy.)

September nodded. "Aye, that's aboot what January said. I telt them you was too... squeamish t'strike first."

Furnace winced, but the statement was true. "Though - if you can add a Month to the Calendar, surely you can take one away?"

"It's not been done before. No' by a vote, at least."

Furnace chose her next words carefully. "Know that I do not say this as a matter of ideology, but as a personal witness: May has done monstrous deeds to support the Establishment. He cannot be allowed to continue."

September looked away. "They already know."

"Tell them, then, that I cannot in good conscience join a Council that has him in it."

September nodded. "I will."

Furnace's hair had been brown curls, before. Now it was almost transparent and soft as a baby's first headful of down.

"I don't know if it will eventually grow back to what you had before," said a hairdresser. "But we can find a way to style it, even if it stays this way. Maybe tie it back with a wide ribbon to reduce strain on the strands?"

"What about in the meantime, before it's long enough to tie back? It tickles when it falls into my face."

"Kerchiefs," the hairdresser said, pulling a rainbow of colored fabric out of her bag like a magic trick. "Let's see which ones of these you like."

Furnace came out of this consultation with a number of triangles with tie-strings, and had been told that if she found a seamstress she could get more made.

She could get more made? She realized how she could wear the embroidered rose-vine yoke on that bizarrely stretched version of her mother's dress.

Cornelius was holding a ceremony with a handful of Prehistoricists and Liberationists in Bone City.

"We're gathered here today," Cornelius said, "to introduce something that the Liberationists told us they could use automation of for safety reasons. January?"

Although January did not typically wear the Dark District's velvet veil, she had one on today. "It is especially important that our streets be clean, because we of the dark wear thin-soled shoes to feel the ground better. A single shard of broken glass could injure many people. The Prehistoricists, as it so happens, have an answer."

Cornelius said, "We have completed... a street-sweeper!"

A curtain was pulled back, to polite applause.

This beast was the size of a dog. In front, it swept the street with beetle-like jaws that had dense bristles underneath. In the center was the receptacle for collected dirt. It scuttled on arachnoid legs. But the most interesting part was how the bristle-jaws had whiskers like a cat's all along the front edge.

"The whiskers took me months," Cornelius said proudly. "I wanted to make sure this thing could figure out where walls were entirely on its own."

And finally: a demonstration. January threw some broken glass in front of the thing, and Cornelius put sugar water into its tank, and it went about sweeping the glass into the middle, then scooping it into the internal dustpan, making a clicking clacking noise as it worked. Then it started ambling forwards, clicking occasionally, and didn't stop. Cornelius had to leap after it and turn it off before it fell off a ledge.

"That's slower than a person would work," someone commented.

"Well, yes," Cornelius said. "But we can put dozens of these out, and they never have to sleep. I think it balances out."

The crowd eventually dispersed, and Cornelius leaned against a pillar. "I'm glad to be finally cooperating with you," he said. "Considering."

January paused, in her pacing back and forth, and turned towards him. "For the longest time, I thought of you as the one who kept trying to reinforce the whole 'natural order of things' nonsense I found despicable. And honestly, I still don't like some of the rhetoric you use. But if your beasts can help with the things that are unreasonably difficult or time-consuming for humans to do, so we can get on with the more important work - I think I'm fine with that."

The deafblind individual who had written in months ago finally came down from the Surface.

Her name was Eloise, and she was given the choice between living in the Dark District or the Deaf Quarter. The choice was between a place where the texture of the stones beneath her feet and the bump-language signs on the doors were all things she could access independently but she would be socially isolated, and a place where she had to be led around by the hand at all times but she could feel other people crowd around her and fingerspell excited greetings into her hand. Of course she chose the latter.

This being said, Eloise's native language was French.

Even the Determined Writer, who upon learning of what was going on had raced to London to cram as much French into himself as possible, was only coherent in French - certainly not fluent. But nobody else knew both French and Neathy Sign Language, so he had to bridge.

Still: Eloise was happy to be surrounded by people who were like her, even if she didn't understand much of anything yet.

April smiled. The Writer and Eloise were visible through the window of a crafting collective, where there were many shelves of yarn to pick from. Eloise was enjoying all the textures. Someone else there was advising the Writer on the thickness of knitting needles.

Eventually, Eloise would come to wear veils, to cover her eyes that roamed everywhere despite being unseeing. But they were not the Dark District's velvet veil. She made her own.

January showed February, a fellow Calendar Councilmember, around the Dark District - but February, far from appreciating it, became more and more frustrated the more disoriented she became.

"So this is what you've been doing with your time," February said, eventually, voice lilting with sarcasm. "Playing at liberation while everyone else suffers. Saving one woman with a giant pot on her head. What else?"

"At first, pulling Furnace Ancona back from the brink of despair was about saving the life of one of the most talented, hardworking, and accomplished leaders the Revolution has ever seen," January said. "And I wanted to learn where that kind of drive came from, and if it could be replicated. But then..."

"Then what?" February demanded.

"...When's the last time you felt truly happy, Febs? Not vindicated. Not viciously satisfied. Not righteous. Happy."

Silence.

"That is what Furnace was trying to demonstrate to us this whole time. You cannot just fight against all your life. If you need a way to keep going in the face of endless failure, if you are to survive helplessness and despair, you need something to fight for."

"Why does it matter whether I'm happy? The Cause is more important than what I feel."

"It matters to me," January said. "I think you are capable, and smart, and I envy your ability to look directly at utilitarian tradeoffs without succumbing to despair. You are a uniquely skilled individual. Thank you for being on our side."

February said nothing, for long enough for January to wonder if she hadn't heard.

"...I want dinner," February said, finally. "I want more of those spicy mashballs."

"Glad you've found something you like about the place."

"But I still hate all the bead curtains."

The Determined Writer and Gracile Agent sat on a rooftop, leaning against each other and watching the City glitter below.

"Thanks for forcing me to knuckle under to the union," the Determined Writer said. "Otherwise, I don't think any of this would have happened."

"I don't know," the Gracile Agent said. "I'm pretty sure Furnace Ancona would have made this place with or without help."

The Writer said, "Without our help she would have turned into the city herself, and left Cornelius and January to bicker over the corpse."

The Agent was quiet, and the Writer put an arm around her shoulders.

"Furnace isn't the same kind of Rev I am," the Agent said. "But I think that's a good thing. It's important to prevent people from just unthinkingly putting almost all of the same institutions back together with different names, after we tear down the old ones, because they don't realize it's possible to do better."

Furnace sat on the bench in her courtyard, blue kerchief tied over her new hair, drinking bitter tea.

This wasn't the courtyard she'd seen in her dreams, but that was a good thing. There was a road, here, where people carried handcarts behind them or walked to work. Someone had pasted a flier advertising a concert onto the side of a buttress. A group of people carrying a large ball and sport-pickaxes (with the tips ground off) flowed past, laughing on the way to a game.

Furnace's shoulders were lighter now, not having to carry a union or a helmet. The City no longer needed her constant attention to prevent it from flying apart. People in her life now demanded that she take extended breaks on a regular basis.

Still. She was the woman with an entire city in her head. And the city in her head was still growing, too.

They still needed some sort of higher education, for one. Perhaps January would appreciate the opportunity to put her own demons to rest, and a research university that could be asked to research things that would improve society would be an incredible asset.

It seemed like people had mistaken her personal dislike for Cornelius as disapproval of Prehistoricism in general. Now that she no longer flinched away from anything having to do with him, she ought to make a personal statement supporting the Prehistoricists. Even though she'd never be able to work with him personally again, Cornelius did deserve a community of like-minded others of his own.

People were using the printing press from the Determined Writer's old newspaper to make regional circulars, but the City could use an actual newspaper. Maybe two competing ones, actually, just to be sure corruption didn't compromise the city's news access.

Perhaps now that the initial rush from London of people just looking for the "free houses" had eased, they could let up on how much work someone needed to do for their housing? Having come from a labor union, she was instinctively suspicious of people who didn't do work, but she also couldn't bear to kick someone out who was old and sick for no fault of their own. Maybe people would need working sponsors? Maybe accumulating a certain number of years would let you stay forever after that? She'd have to think about it.

April and the Determined Writer had both been learning to use the Red Science from the Gracile Agent. April had come to Furnace, afterwards, and though Furnace still didn't understand that much of Neathy Sign Language, she got the gist of what April was telling her: Buildings could be made larger on the inside.

The City still had room to grow.