The freeze took four days to stop being an announcement and start being a fact.
Nobody starved in that time and nobody was killed by it, which was the design. An instrument that kills people creates martyrs, while an instrument that makes membership expensive creates arithmetic.
Torrel Bend felt it first, since Torrel Bend had the least left to absorb it with. The city was rebuilding a southern quarter entirely out of its own reserve.
The reward channel that should have funded that work had been frozen for six days. Nothing in the determination had moved, and nobody in the capital had filed a finding against them.
Its ward crews went onto deferred pay on the second day of the charter freeze. The operator signed that deferral himself and published what the city owed each crew.
A south-quarter crew chief put the question to him in the yard on the third morning. She had eleven people clearing rubble on promised money and two of them with families in the wrecked rows.
