The alarm carried no sound, because the engine had never needed one before.
Every civic slate in the freed districts lit at once with the same three-line reading, and the reading did not agree with itself.
The north heart ran hot, the river heart ran slow and heavy, while the sky heart skipped every fourth beat.
"They are not failing together," Aria said, laying the three rhythms across Hajin's sight as the stair cleared. "They are failing separately, on three different schedules, toward three different disasters."
The war table had assembled itself in the engine's outer hall by the time he arrived. A city that had spent one day learning to disagree could still agree on an emergency.
Warden Ilyra brought the engine ledgers, Oren brought weather readings older than his own hands, and Sava brought ink-stained maps with no tremor at all.
Fear had a strict hierarchy, and this emergency outranked it.
