The whole ring stopped for the water hour, and nobody had thought to mention it to him.
Trafalgar had come down to the second ring to check one thing in the manifest office, and found the manifest office shut, along with two of the three loading yards and most of the street. Everything that could stop had stopped. Everyone who could queue was queueing, four hundred of them wound back along the canal wall in a line that moved the way glaciers move.
So he joined it, because standing in it was less conspicuous than standing beside it, and because Rhosyn had told him twice that queues were where this city did its talking.
She was thirty paces behind him, leaning on a bollard, watching nothing at all.
The line shuffled forward. Twenty minutes in, a man came up at his shoulder and started complaining about the water.
