The fragment sat cold in his pattern while Nox held it there without giving it an answer. A query was not a command, and he read that difference before committing to either side of it.
"It wants the cities to vote, and it will not seat a route until they do," Nox said, watching the twenty freed gates cross his map, "so we hand it to the operators who shut their own doors."
He would not answer for twenty seats that had never asked him to speak for them. The operators who had shut their own doors would set the terms of any route through them.
Vasa pulled the twenty gates onto her board and priced what a shared route would cost each one to join. She did not draft a claim, she drafted a contract that any signer could tear up the hour it stopped serving them.
"A permanent route is ownership by another name, so every seat here signs revocable passage for defense and supply," Vasa said, laying the terms into a column, "and the day a city revokes, its gate goes local again."
