“Every call fits the scale — street, city, world, cosmos. This one doesn't. Openbook heard it surface in a dockworker's thoughts and went pale, which her regulars have never seen; she says it's not a call, it's a call being listened to. Citadel has taken it into her fortress and sealed the gates, and for the first time in recorded history she has asked the other orders for nothing. Her only statement: the fortress has a new rule, carved under the old one. Nobody has asked what it says.”
A call came in that the Call Scale can't hold.