The Foundry Quarter's compulsory pattern stopped pretending to be a militia and started being a machine.
Occupied bodies climbed into the housing block's load frames, the great scaffolds once built for raising engine parts into the sky.
Their hands knew the ropes, because the pattern had deliberately chosen workers who knew them. From inside them, the pattern began dismantling the block to build a weapon it understood.
Three hundred unwilling citizens became three hundred hands on three hundred ropes, and the housing block above them, home to six hundred more, began to lift on the shared count.
"The pattern is going to drop the whole block on the school street."
Aria's projection drew the falling arc in red across every sight.
"A mass weapon with a civilian payload, so any strike against it kills the occupants."
The compulsory layer had learned from the baker's street exactly what this family would not do, and it had built its next move entirely out of that knowledge.
