The conversion order had to reach four hundred thousand people before it could take anything from them.
That was the one weakness in an instrument nobody could file against. A buffer draw does not convert on a marshal's desk, and it never has.
The order travels to every platform holding a resolved block and notifies the architecture there. Nine hours of emergency procedure had put that notice on every reception board in the country.
Ava read it on a platform sign in the capital's freight district at thirty-one minutes past the hour.
She had two thousand nine hundred people inside Emilia's braced bay by then. The corridor had closed at the forty-first minute and the last eleven hundred were still above ground.
Every board in that bay carried the emergency notice text in full. It was four lines long, it named a conversion authority, and it listed an execution time.
Nobody standing under those boards understood a word of what they were reading.
