The first proxy reached the top step and stopped with its grey sleeve brushing the rusted steel that Beatrix's enforcers had leaned across the stairhead. Behind it the column halted too, forty clay figures locked on the stone stairs with their lacquered faces tilted toward the lamplight. None of them reached for the blades in front of them.Lin's voice came through the crystal, sharp with concentration. "They're waiting for something, Melvin. Every thread in that column bends toward the loading rail, and the whole bundle is pulling at once."Melvin had taken the regulator back from Sun Wen at the end of the old carrier's cycle. The stone dragged at his palms in a long, steady pull. His own sight could not reach across a continent, so he read the proxies one body at a time through Lin's numbers."Read me the rail, Lin. Every needle there, and the depth of each one."Lin read the figures in a flat, careful voice, and the numbers came through the crystal one after another. "Kaelen's nine

"Then I'll cut the line when I can reach it. For now, hold the flow with me," Melvin said, and shifted the weight of the pull into both pairs of hands at once.Merrow's voice came in over the western line, tight and quick. "Twelve positions have gone under in the last minute, Melvin, all of them in the north wing, where the cold started first. My staff are pulling them back now, one by one.""Bring them back, Merrow. Put your own hands on them if you have to.""We're doing it. Ten are coming up already," Merrow said, and the line crackled with the sound of people running.It took eleven minutes for the readings to settle. When they did, Merrow came back on the line with his voice dropped to a grim flatness. "Ten are back and breathing. Two did not come back, Melvin. Ruth Alden and Samuel Greer."Melvin closed his eyes for one breath. Ruth Alden had brought her own cushion to the car park every morning for nine weeks, and Samuel Greer had asked Doss twice whether his position would hur

"Keep your eyes on the steps, boss," Kaelen warned, shifting his splinted arm against his chest.They went down the stone stairs in a single line. Melvin walked at the front with his sight open, and Lin came behind him with the frame. Kaelen followed with his splinted arm held close, then Qiu with her lamp, and Lu at the back between two of Beatrix's enforcers.The clay proxies stood on both sides of the steps with their grey robes hanging still. None of them turned its head as the living passed.The stairwell turned in a slow spiral, and the air grew colder with every step. Melvin counted the turns out of habit, and by the fortieth he had stopped counting the proxies. The lamp at the front of the line swayed with every turn.The chamber opened into a stone room of eighty-one sockets. Melvin read every ring and found each one seated and humming. At the centre of the room, on a plain granite slab, lay a man who had clearly been dying for years.Yan Shou's flesh had withered to the bone

The western network began to go cold in patches, and the patches did not stay where they started. Merrow reported the first of them over the line at dawn. By the time the sun cleared the eastern hills there were nine, each one moving across the car park at the pace of a man walking."Volunteers are speaking in the old tongue, Melvin. Only some of them, but enough that every family on this site has heard it," Merrow reported. His voice was hoarse, and shouting came through the line behind him."What are they saying?""Old words, the same rhythm every time. A woman in row thirty asked her daughter to bring her a plate, and her voice came out of the mouth of a retired clerk two positions away."Melvin looked down at the regulator. He had come back to the crater by stone ship in the night, and the flow came up through the stone into his hands the moment he laid them on the disc. Chloe lay on her cot at the edge of the rim with a breathing cloth over her mouth.Sun Wen lay beside her with

"So Yan Shou's proxy came through the gate wearing Lu's face. Hui saw the face and let it in, and then someone killed him and wrote a fever over the death," Melvin reasoned."That's the reading, Doctor. I have entered charges against the dead man for the record, as the law requires. The charge is obstruction of a sealed escort, and the defendant is Gate Warden Hui," Chen said, and his voice did not change at all."Enter a second charge against the physician who signed the record, in the same ink.""Already entered, Doctor.""Then keep every entry open for the federal observers, Chen. Varga will want to read every name before she reads a single rule."Outside, the light had turned copper over the crater rim, and the cots along the edge of the stone threw long shadows across the disc. A cold wind came off the far ridges, and the marshals pulled their coats tighter.Lin had not spoken for several minutes. She stood with the frame in one hand and the day's sheet in the other, and she was