Clunk hiss.

Taru ran the usual measurements to ensure rig 1.3 was working optimally; heaved the lever for piston 138 into automatic; kicked the main cog on gear train 137 back into place; loosened the third gear on train 131; wrestled out a sample of piston 138’s fluids for analysis in the labs; crawled into a perfectly her-sized gap to patch up a leaky pipe under the control panel; heaved piston 138 to automatic; changed out the drained dragonstone (dull purple) for charged dragonstone (glowing red); squeezed between piston 138 and 139 to clean away a buildup of brown gunk; heaved piston 138 to automatic; and finally returned to Enna with the measurements, heart pounding.

He asked, “Is it still kicking back?” as she wiped her brow with the back of a grimy leather glove, then wrote her measurements down, his black feather quill dancing over the paper.

“Aye. I got a sample of the fluid on a slow turn, though. I think it might be clogging.”

The quill paused and Enna looked up over his glasses. “Oh aye?”

She nodded and thumbed back over her shoulder. “There’s buildup around the bolts, 137’s gear train keeps getting knocked out of whack, and the rig’s feeder pipe bust. The fluid might be running thick. Could be a clot.”

Enna nodded slowly, his eyes darting around Taru’s face before they settled back on his paper. “Good job,” he said.

“What?” Taru asked.

“I said good job.”

“I heard you, but you looked at me like I was off me tree.”

Enna huffed a laugh, removing his pinch-noses when he looked at her this time. “I was just thinking how—”

Taru didn’t know whether the klaxon blared first or the door burst open. Another manager filled the door as the alarm sounded, sweat pouring from her brow and eyes lurching from Taru to Enna. “Samuel’s caught.”

There was barely a moment of sinking feeling in her gut before Taru bolted for the hall, shoving past the manager and yanking on her goggles and ear protectors. She flew through the open doorway to rig 1.5’s office and was heaving open the handwheel on the hatch to the rig when Enna yelled after her, his voice growing closer with every word,

“Crawlspace nine, possible train or chain snag, possible stone malfunction. You need a full ward for safety.”

She checked the forearm of her overalls and, seeing nothing where the wardstone should have been (and not knowing where to find one), called back, “No time!” as she shoved open the hatch.

He had her by the scruff of the neck before she registered that she couldn’t move. “Don’t be bloody stupid,” he shouted as he clicked a glowing amber dragonstone ward into the slot on her forearm. “If that stops shining, you get out of there. No use losing two of you.”

Taru nodded, gripped his shoulder in thanks, and leapt down the stairs into rig 1.5. The hatch thunked closed behind her.

Rig 1.5 looked just like rig 1.3, though a little more open and easier to navigate: she jogged (upright!) along brass pipes and neatly bundled leather cables; passed between great wood units full of chained cogs and gear trains without tucking her elbows; and remained straight-backed as she checked the brass-cornered control panel with its steadily glowing red dragonstones—definitely not malfunctioning. It smelt of the same grease, wood, and metal concoction, but what was a rhythmic hiss of steam and clunk of metal in 1.3 was a chaos of noise here. A shrill whistle came from somewhere and, even through the leather cushions covering her ears, it drove Taru mad. She barely heard the trumpet bell speaker click over it.

Crackly with pipe echo, Enna announced, “We’re here, Samuel. We’re on our way to you in crawlspace nine,” like he was reciting the results of a piston assessment. “Keep calm. We’ll have you out in no time.”

Right. Crawlspace 9.

After checking her forearm to make sure the dragonstone was still red, Taru ducked, squeezing through pipes to get to the vents. She crawled along, her voice echoing dully in her head as she counted off each vent one by one. She needn’t have bothered: 9 was open and Samuel’s legs were hanging out, shivering with rigidity. Once she ensured the vent wasn’t sparking, she found it plenty wide enough to crawl in alongside him, noting on the way past his chest that, though he was breathing, it was too shallow and quick. 

“We’re here, Samuel,” she said, touching his hand and face and finding them cold but damp. “Keep calm.” His other arm was outstretched in front of him, the fist tangled in a fine gold pendant chain, but otherwise unharmed. There was no reason for him to be in this state. “We’ll have you out in no time,” she asserted. Now she knew he wasn’t caught in any machinery or poisoned by malfunctioning dragonstone, she could pull him out without worry and let the others in to help.

Just as she was about to wriggle her way back out of the vent, she heard it again. Only upon hearing it did she realise it had ever stopped. The whistle. Her head jerked up.

Red eyes met hers, glowing like two oval dragonstones split down the middle with black. For an intolerable moment, they stared at her. Then, they shifted closer in the darkness. She smelled the reek of smoke pouring out of them before she saw the scaly nostrils. She caught the flash of white teeth before she saw that nasty grin.

“Dragon?!” she gasped.

“You are meant for more, Taru Aether Charsen.”

-~*~-

Taru watched the control panel warily, chewing on the skin around her thumbnail as Enna checked the thing over for the 3rd time. He shook his head as he straightened and looked back at her. “It’s fine, Taru. The stones are stable. The console’s pristine. It’s in better condition than ours. Not even a splinter.”

Taru glanced at the amber dragonstone ward on her forearm for the 300th time. She shivered and looked back at Enna. “Check again.”

“Taru—”

“There has to be a fault.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it. This whole rig is operating perfectly, when it’s operating.” It wasn’t operating now because its operator was in the infirmary. “All the pistons are in automatic and running at the proper rates. The gears and cogs are well oiled and keeping good time. The pipes are intact. The cables are well-managed and appropriately connected.”

Taru gnawed at a patch of dry skin on her bottom lip. Enna glanced at it and frowned.

“He probably just dropped his necklace into the vent and got stuck trying to get it out,” he said.

“He wasn’t stuck,” she muttered.

“He could’ve fell asleep.”

“He was shaking.”

“He might not’ve been sleeping proper at night.”

Taru shook her head.

Enna continued. “If I don’t sleep proper, I wake up with the shakes sometimes. Like qualm. That’s probably all it were.”

“You should probably see a healer about that.”

“Probly. Look—” he stepped past the console and gripped her upper arms, ducking to meet her darting eyes “—it’s fine.”

She stared into his wide, earnest expression. 

“Everything’s fine,” he said. “He’s at the healer. He’ll probly be back here after lunch. You did great.”

Taru bit hard on her bottom lip to stop the words as she glanced between his eyes. He’d never responded well to her self-deprecation but this time she really didn’t think she’d done anything at all, never mind anything great. She didn’t know what Samuel had been doing in there, or why he had been shaking. Most of all, she didn’t know what she had seen: what she had heard. 

She took a deep breath in through her nose until her ribs felt like they would burst, then let it out slowly between pursed lips and, nodding, looked away.

“That’s the spirit,” Enna cheered, patting her shoulder. “Now then, Selwyn said he had a word with High Laird Bryant and, because of your quick thinking, you and I can have a full tea-service with lunch, on them.” With a guiding hand on her shoulder, he led her out of rig 5 and then out of engine 1.

-~*~-

Taru took a bite of buttered muffin and cringed, looking down at the stale, dirt-tasting thing in disgust and then across at the kitchen staff in betrayal.

Enna laughed. “Not as good as my brothers’, is it?”

Taru shook her head and spat her mouthful out onto the napkin from the bread basket. “I think it’s off,” she mumbled. “I’ll just have the stew.”

“It’s not their fault, I suppose,” Enna continued. “They can’t get ingredients as fresh as what Tiremy can in Bluff. This is the city, after all. Not the countryside. Most of us don’t even know what a wheat farm looks like.”

Taru settled in as he launched into his usual rant about how life in the satellite villages must be so much easier, with fresher air and better food and nicer people. He didn’t know anyone else who had left the city, and he didn’t know how Tiremy and Joppe had managed it in the first place, but he freely admitted that sometimes— “just sometimes, mind” —he felt a little— “just a little” —jealous. 

“Not that Shude’s awful,” he asserted quickly, glancing at the booth across from them where a group of two managers and a mechanic were arguing over a bread roll. “Just that out there’s more… quainter. The letters Tiremy sends with our weekly bread make it sound woven, anyway.”

Always our. The word made Taru feel… complicated. Warm and accepted. Antsy and uncomfortable. But it was the truth: the bread was both of theirs. Whenever Enna received a hamper, he gave half of it to Taru and she treasured every morsel. Food at the orphanage was worse than at the terminal. Tiremy’s bread was the only thing in the city that didn’t taste as if it had been dredged up from a gutter less than a minute beforehand.

Enna talked some more about his brothers, told a few stories Taru had heard before and never tired of hearing, and then moved onto the tea ceremony, something she had never quite mastered, despite his careful tutelage.

After the arduous ritual of tea-making and -taking was over with, Enna got into a discussion with one of the managers at the table across from them about the finer points of automaton engineering and, under the guise of running the sample from piston 138 to the labs, Taru gave them the slip. Since Enna had turned his attention away from her, every time she so much as blinked she saw glowing red eyes in the black of her mind. Had Samuel seen them too?

Once she’d deposited the sample with the labs, she took the long and winding route back up the spire, stopping as she reached the infirmary; her hand poised ready to knock on the frosted glass window of the wood door.

“Enough of this nonsense, Sam.”

“She’s one of ‘em, mam. She has to be.”

“She’s not a magical creature. She’s ‘uman, just like you and I.”

“I’m telling you, she—”

“I know, Sam. I know. Just wait there a second. I’ll see if I can find the healer.”

A chair scraped and as Samuel’s mother’s footsteps disappeared into the distance, a gruff voice closer to the door mumbled something unintelligible before clearly asserting, “I always knew there was summat off about her.”

“The rig she’s in is tight as anything, too,” Samuel insisted. “No one ‘sept children and magic folk could get round that space, specially not as quick as she does. And her manager’s a magic sympathiser.”

“Loads more of them around these days, Sam. There’s all sorts of propaganda being bandied about, you know, saying magical creatures aren’t dangerous and rubbish like that. Some even call ‘em mages, trying to make them sound all cutesy. Can’t blame anyone for getting sucked in. It’s all very well written. Very convincing.”

“I guess so.”

“But we can’t be having them in our city, can we? Gotta keep the place clean.”

Footsteps returned, two sets this time, as Samuel replied, weaker,

“I… I guess so…”

“Sam,” his mother said, “the healer’s going to give you a stronger potion, if that’s all right?”

“It’s just a mild relaxant to help you calm down. Nothing too serious,” the healer assured him. Taru recognised her soft but assertive tone from the time when, at 15 years old, Taru got her arm caught in gear train 139.

“Yes please,” Samuel snapped. “I’m feeling very… not well… again.”

The door opened before Taru realised anyone was near it. She was suddenly face to face with a familiar figure from the lower levels of engine 1, one whose name she had never learnt. Her hard eyes pierced Taru.

“Afternoon,” the woman said at last, tone clipped. “Good work getting our kid out the vent.”

Taru shook her head, unable to form any more response than that.

“Anyway, Ange, I’d best be heading down now. See you both at dinner. Mark’s making his famous corned meat hash.” And then to Taru, “Scuse me.”

Taru hopped out of the way and glanced past the woman in time to catch eyes with Samuel who, already blissed out from the potion, smiled lazily back at her.

-~*~-

The rest of the day passed in a blur. The night, however, was calm: it was the first in as long as she could remember that she did not dream of Dragon. Instead, she dreamt of running over roofs and hopping between balconies. When she woke the next day, she learnt why.