Mikhail sat by the bench in the makeshift lab, elbows planted on the battered wooden surface. His mother had taken over what amounted to the armoury. She’d had Yeger and him stack all the weapons in a pile in the corner to clear the benches—where she’d quickly put together an alchemical set. What she couldn’t find parts for, she crafted with uzhasgart.

  Yeger lounged against the doorframe of the open door, watching Elana with narrowed eyes as she spread a selection of disassembled weapons on the bench beside Mikhail.

  “The problem,” Elana said, “is surviving a half mile drop. Ideas?”

  “If the shaft is narrow enough,” Mikhail said, “some kind of friction device to brace against the walls and slow descent?”

  “Hah,” Yeger said, “that would work fine with a ton of coal falling with you.”

  Elana nodded. “Besides, anything like that would wear out and break before you even travelled half that distance.”

  “An extract to absorb the fall?” Yeger suggested.

  “Possibly,” Elana said. “We’ll need to have a look at what Yuri has and what plants we can get.”

  “What about grappling pistols?” Even as he said it, Mikhail knew it wouldn’t work. Half a mile, duh.

  Yeger burst out laughing. “Twenty feet of cord, half-a-mile fall,” he said between gasps.

  A light smile touched Elana’s lips.

  “Fine,” Mikhail said, folding his arms, his cheeks burning. “What about curling up in a ball and pretending to be coal?”

  Elana and Yeger stared at him.

  Mikhail rolled his eyes. “Let’s just focus on the problem. We have a half mile drop—assuming we can trust Adamov—strength extract won’t keep someone alive, bones will still break and impacting the coal at the bottom would shred your skin…”

  “Correct,” Elana said. “In addition, your internal organs would likely be mashed as well.”

  “What height can you safely jump from with strength extract?” Mikhail asked.

  “Thirty feet,” Yeger said without hesitation. “Fifty with reflex and speed extract so you can make a perfect landing. The instant your feet touch the ground you need to gradually reduce your speed and drop into a roll, transferring the downward energy of your drop into lateral movement.”

  Mikhail’s jaw fell open as he stared at Yeger. “How do you know that?”

  Yeger arched an eyebrow. “Understanding force and motion is important for a fighter. The better I understand it, the better I fight. And survive. I need to know why something works so I can use it in other areas. You do the same.”

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  “I do?”

  “Yes,” Yeger said. “When we trained in the maze in Borovsk, you knew you were pathetically weak and insignificant, but have decent body weight. With that knowledge, you grabbed a crossbow and used the force of its metal arm combined with your momentum to land a ‘punch’ on me that you could not otherwise throw.”

  Elana rounded on Mikhail, her brow pinched. “You shot a crossbow in Blinov’s face?”

  “He lived. It’s fine,” Mikhail said.

  “You could have destroyed his nose and knocked him out, potentially giving him brain damage!”

  Mikhail cast a sidelong look at Yeger, who chuckled.

  “He did,” Yeger said. “But a healing extract fixed that.”

  “Anyway…” Mikhail cleared his throat. “There isn’t going to be someone to catch you or a flexible canvas mainframe to break your fall like jumping from the Alchemist airship. A fall of fifty feet onto solid ground is survivable with the right extracts, so we either we need new extracts, or a way to slow the fall so the impact speed is the same as a fifty-foot drop.”

  “Better if it can be the same as a thirty-foot drop,” Elana said. “We can assume there’ll be no light in the coal shaft, which means you won’t be able to see the ground to land properly.”

  “What about you?” Yeger asked. “You can fly.”

  Elana frowned. “I can’t fly.”

  “But you could make the drop without injury,” Mikhail said.

  “Yes. And Yustitsiya and I are the best ones to cause mayhem. However, I need to get to the Sila, there’s no direct access to it from the lower mine.”

  “Could you send Yustitsiya with whoever went down?” Mikhail asked.

  “No. We cannot be separated by more than a hundred yards.”

  “Why?”

  Elana’s brow wrinkled. “Because the pain is unbearable. And yes, I know from experience.”

  “All right…” Mikhail rummaged around until he found a sheet of paper and a pen, then began sketching. “We have a shaft, two hundred feet long, perhaps six feet wide. At the base of that shaft is a catcher full of coal. We can assume the coal is sealed in, so the air in the shaft is still. Which means, anything falling has to displace the air.”

  Elana’s eyes widened. “Of course! All we need is something to restrict the flow of air past whoever is falling, and that will slow their descent.”

  “Exactly!” Mikhail said.

  Yeger snapped his fingers. “Maria mentioned that in Machtvoll they have a… parachute. A large canvas bag she said they used slow falls in airship combat.”

  Mikhail and Elana glanced at each other. “That could work,” Mikhail said. “A canvas sheet a little smaller than the chute and tethered by ropes to whoever is going down should slow them a lot.”

  “All right,” Elana said with a nod. “You get that working. Now, I’ll need to make more extracts for this. Blinov, find Trubnikov and get a list of extracts he has in store.”

  Yeger nodded and strode from the room.

  No sooner had he left than Elana ran a hand over her eyes and sighed.

  “What’s wrong?” Mikhail asked.

  Elana waved him away. “I’m fine. Yustitsiya is just mad at me for not letting her be in control.” She took a breath and smiled at him. “Now, I need to teach you as much as I can.”

  “Why?”

  Elana’s smile faded, and she reached out and squeezed his shoulder. “Because the Alchemist Guild has kept a hold on every extract recipe for hundreds of years, but it’s time that the rest of Serovnya knew.”

  “But you can show them.”

  “Yes… I suppose I can. But just in case, you should know too. Now, ironhide, that’s a fun one to make…”

  Mikhail’s gut twisted as he watched the shell of his mother as she found some paper and began furiously scribbling on it. He couldn’t quite bring himself to wish her ill, but on the same coin… she wasn’t his mother. He took a deep breath and twisted around so he could read Elana’s notes.