The demand arrived over a civic telegraph at the eighth hour and forty minutes, from four men who had never stood on a wall. It was filed as a request for reconsideration of the diverted route, which is the language the record has kept.
What the four of them wanted was the tide turned back west, across the canal into the outer district. Eleven thousand people live there in rented rooms above workshops, with no garrison post inside a kilometre of most of them.
The eastern quarter holds nine hundred households behind a wall a landscape contractor put up.
Nobody on the inner council used the word property in any of the four transmissions. They said exposure, insured value, plus a phrase about the strategic concentration of civic assets that Luna wrote down twice.
Vell was still in the market row when the second transmission came through. He had one working arm, a bear with a crushed hip beside him, plus four hours before anything reached the park line.
