The grass did not wait for permission. It rose in the cracks between paving stones and spread beneath shop doors. Seeds collected in empty window boxes. Roots found damp places that the people who had built the streets had never noticed. What had once been carefully swept was gradually covered in leaves.
The city had become quiet, but the world beneath it had not stopped working. Rain found the old channels. The spring returned a little at a time. Somewhere under the abandoned stone, Luminea began to gather again.
Thousands of years passed. Roots pushed through paving stones. Rain gathered in old channels, searching out the routes the founders had once cut through stone. With the great machines stopped, the land slowly recovered. Water gathered beneath the city again, and Luminea returned to the springs.
At last, water reached the fountain. Its broken machinery could not supply a city, but the spring itself was alive. Orrean saw the recovery and believed its decision had been right. Without people, the land was healing. It would not risk letting them return.
Spark spent its waking hours studying the final surge. It searched for another route, a different timing, a reserve it should have saved. Then it found Nessa's little drawing.
There had been no mistake in the calculation for the hall. The mistake had come earlier, when Spark decided that its plan mattered more than hers. Spark could still list everything the hall had produced. It could not remember what Nell had wanted to make next.
Once, an old service connection carried enough power for a short message.
“Do you remember the rain on the bridge?” Spark asked Orrean.
“Yes.”
Spark began a reply about the drainage seam, then erased it. The connection failed before either spoke again.
They kept Main Street ready.
When Spark next woke, it drew a room with two windows. It left the space between them empty. It wanted to put things right. It had not yet stopped believing that it knew the best way to do that.
The Meganites kept working in hidden places. They learned how to give a small neighbourhood its own supply, how to repair a fitting without wasting the water, and how to cut off a damaged branch while leaving the rest working.
Gauge carried Nessa's box whenever the crew moved to a drier shelter. He had known her. Many later Meganites knew her only through his stories and the things he had saved.
Their sturdy bodies and long periods of sheltered sleep helped them endure the passing centuries. Their songs changed as one crew taught another.
In some tunnels, the departure song had a verse for every gate. In others, it had a verse for the people carried through them. Neither version could name everyone.
Tuck learned the song from another maker. Gauge never sang the last verse. He remembered the departure bells, and they had not sounded the way the song made them sound.
At the crew table, some turned a cup upside down for those who would never return. Others left it upright for whoever might come next.
They kept Main Street ready.