Pel had tried to come out of the room.
He was on the floor below the window, one knee folded under him, the connecting tube pulled taut across his chest. Anet saw him from the platform and went back along the ledge. Selka heard the scrape of the girl's shoes above the steam.
“Take my hand,” Anet said.
Pel reached up. She gripped his wrist and leaned back, pulling with the strength she still borrowed from the same branch. He came an inch off the floor and cried out.
Selka ran toward the service stair. A guard lunged across it, blade raised. Kerr caught the man's arm, and the two went down against the rail. More boots sounded below.
“We can't get up,” Kerr said, straining. “Selka, we can't.”
She looked at Sorell on the lower landing, the bellows laid out beside the blankets. The forewoman could reach the passage from her landing, but the fight filled the mouth of the upper stair. She had no way up to Pel's room. Iven was holding the third bell and a rope, ready for the daughter they could reach if she came down.
Not for the man above her.
Anet's hand slipped. Pel fell back. She knelt on the ledge, trying to get her shoulder through the window.
“Let me,” he told her.
He did not mean let me die. He meant let him find a way to stand, as he had always done, with his own legs and the branch and a chair placed where his hand could catch it. But the chair was behind him, and his leg would not unfold.
“Pel.” Selka's voice carried up into the room.
He lifted his face toward the window. “The gate will stick,” he said. “They'll force it and break the whole tooth. Tell them to ease it.”
Anet closed her eyes. Then she lifted his hand onto the windowsill so he would not have to hold it up.
“I'll tell them,” Selka said.
Voss shouted for the guards to take the platform. One started along the upper passage. Anet climbed back toward the loosened pipe seam. Her tube followed her, warm and bright. At the platform she turned the last bolt twice and stopped.
Selka could still stop her. She could call her down, let Voss put the frame back in order, ask a pardon for Kerr as well. She would be choosing with her eyes open this time. No infant in her arms. No confusion she could offer herself in the dark.
Anet looked down at her.
Selka wanted to call her back. She raised her hand instead, the same small gesture she had made from the foundry door when Anet was little. Anet held her gaze for a moment, then turned back to the seam.
Anet slipped her arm under the brace and drew the cutting tool through the remaining soft bronze hold.
The seam split.
Water struck the wall. The lifting branch went dark. Over the anchor the frame's arms fell clear of the collar, striking the floor with a crash that drove the air from Selka's lungs.
The pendant on Anet's chest darkened. She had one breath left from before the cut. She used it to grip the rope Iven had thrown up. Then her body failed to find the next.
She fell against the platform rail.
Selka ran beneath her. Iven braced the rope around the stair post. Kerr drove the guard back against the upper stair. Sorell came off the landing into the passage beneath the platform. Together they lowered the girl badly, too fast, her shoulder striking iron on the way down. Selka caught her head before it hit the floor.
Anet's eyes were open. She looked at her mother as if waiting for an explanation that words could not give her.
Sorell knelt and fitted the mouthpiece. Iven took the handles. Leather folded. The first movement did nothing Selka could see.
“Again,” she said.
“I am,” Iven answered.
She held Anet's hand. Its fingers were colder than they had been on the foundry bench. Somewhere above them Pel's tube rattled once against the wall, then stopped.
Anet's eyes moved toward the window. Her hand tried to rise in Selka's. Selka held it without pressing it down.
“I heard,” she told her. “I'll tell them about the gate.”
A tear ran into Anet's hair. Iven kept the handles moving.
The remaining city branches still hissed. The whole hearth had not ended. Only this branch, the one they had known they were taking from these two bodies.
Voss shouted something to Selka. She could hear it but did not understand. Her daughter's chest moved under the mouthpiece, then sank. Sorell looked at her.
“Go.”
Selka shook her head.
“We have her,” the forewoman said. “You have another job.”
The exposed anchor stood across the chamber. Ruun waited beside it, helpless to strike the thing that held it. The god's throat was open, its stone finger lifted as though it might once have pointed out a road.
Selka kissed Anet's cold knuckles. Then she put the hand in Sorell's and stood.