Ivory powers nine floors off one stacked core array in the plant level, so a collapse there is a door problem before it is a fire. Every powered bolt in the building reverts to its last held state, which on that morning meant shut.
A building that locks itself has written its own casualty list before anybody starts counting.
Alder Vance took the array off its seat at the ninth hour and thirty-nine minutes, from inside a plant room bolted behind him. Luna Marr timed the drop off the guild's own metering feed, which ran four seconds longer than the array it was measuring.
[Tower core array: collapsed.]
The collapse trapped nineteen people below the fourth floor, most of them on the holding levels where Ivory keeps its indenture contracts. It sealed the private Vance vault on the plant landing, which sits inside the same riser as the furnace throat.
