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  Tinvel

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  Tinvel woke, against his will, an hour before sunrise. His eyes simply snapped open, his body alight with energy. Knowing there was no use in trying to fall back asleep, he rolled out of his bunk with a groan, feet hitting the cool stone of the dormitory.

  He stretched, looking up and down the rows. He was the only one up, of course. Too full of nervous energy to light a candle and read a book on his bunk, he began dressing for the day to come. He grabbed his flight equipment from under his bed, putting on what he could, folding over an arm that which was too hot to wear on the ground. Then, silently, he slipped outside.

  The rainy season’s coming back around, Tinvel noted. The lightest of mists was gently floating down onto the streets, leaving the cobblestones slick beneath his boots. This early in the morning, there wasn’t even candlelight in the windows. Just row after row of darkened homes, lit by the stars bove.

  Tinvel shivered, tucking his hands into his flight jacket. He knew most northerners would ugh at him for that, but this was as chilly as Tulian ever got. The only pce he’d been with cooler weather was high, high above.

  A month after the world’s first pne had smmed into the ocean, Tinvel finally thought its repcement was well and truly ready. They were nearing the end of a battery of slow, gentle test flights, pushing the new design a touch farther every day. Even after all of Professor Brown’s warnings, it had taken his and Chona’s crash to put a proper fear of failure into Tulian’s burgeoning flight school. Their survival had been miraculous enough that, for a brief few days, there had been talk among the other students of divine interference, suggestions that Tavan himself was eager to see what they could produce.

  That talk had ended the moment Chona got wind of it. She’d gone on a tear up and down the flight program’s ranks, stabbing a finger into the chest of anyone and everyone, saying that if they really thought her spellcraft was so incompetent that only a god could expin her survival, they should prove it.

  The other students, having seen for themselves the fifty-foot columns of fme that spat from Chona’s hands during every one of Garen’s dueling lessons, forgot the theory ever existed.

  Tinvel’s steps slowed. He’d reached the outskirts of the aerodrome, and as he almost always did, he spent a long moment taking it in.

  Tulian’s aerodrome, officially known only as the University’s “Sheltered Experimental Laboratory,” was a truly gargantuan building. It had been built in the empty space created by Garen’s massacre of the Sporaton Knights at the end of the war, when he’d tossed rows of homes out into the sea. There’d been talk of building dorms there, but in the end, once Professor Brown had described the Aerodrome and its possibilities, no other bid had won out.

  There were plenty that would argue with him, but Tinvel thought the aerodrome was the truest symbol of what even the common folk had started calling Tulian’s Industrial Revolution. It ran the entire length of the University, but it was utterly unlike the centuries-old stone and mortar construct it faced. It was the first building in Tulian with walls built not just with mere concrete, but reinforced concrete, Sara’s long-sought ‘rebar’ finally cheap enough to yer throughout an entire building. Tinvel still struggled to internalize just how cheap steel had become, not to mention how much cheaper Sara intended to make it.

  The aerodrome’s roof was built entirely of steel. Steel joined to steel by steel. The undermost yers were thick steel beams, fifty-foot behemoths that had been cast and bent into semicircles either by Tulian’s first colossal steam hammers, or Hurlish. When id atop the walls of the aerodrome, many in the city thought the half-finished product disturbing. They said it resembled the rotting ribcage of some metal giant, fallen dead in the middle of the city.

  Then the Champion herself had come with a massive pile of corrugated metal sheeting, and she brought with her strange “rivet guns,” spending two straight days helping the construction workers learn how to use their miraculous new devices.

  To secure the sheets in pce, each individual rivet needed to be struck with a hammer hundreds of times, as hard as one could, and each of the hundreds of sheets needed to be secured with dozens of rivets. In another time, it would have been the work of months. Maybe years.

  A week after Sara had shown up, the aerodrome was finished. The rivet guns could turn normal humans Css or not, into miracle workers. And Tinvel could take some pride in that. While the tools were officially a product of the Artificery Union, the core of their enchantments had been based on his own work. The crystals he had enchanted to pulse hundreds of times a minute, using multi-foot strokes that powered the propeller of a pne? The Carrion immigrants had been delivered some of the recovered crystals from the pne crash, which they copied, weakened, tweaked, shortened, and finally turned on their side, so that they could fit in one little hand tool that did nothing more than bounce the head of a hammer faster than the eye could track. With those rivet guns at their disposal, the workers had cd the aerodrome in steel after barely a week of work.

  To Tinvel, the aerodrome, despite being built specifically to help him in his work, was a very direct reminder of how much he simply didn’t matter. Sara had tasked him with breaking new ground, creating new wonders of artificery, and she’d built all this to help him do it, but at the end of the day? His work wouldn’t be what changed the world. It would be the things built off of his innovations, the tiny, practical tools. Those would be what actually changed the way people lived their lives. Maybe someday, gods knew when, it would be possible for folks to travel in the pnes he had helped invent, and he could say he brought flight to the masses. He hoped that day would be soon. But long before it ever arrived, he knew that every person, everywhere, would be living in homes made with things he’d never had a hand in making.

  That’s what the aerodrome was, really. Not the birthpce of flight. Just one more step in an endless forward march.

  “Couldn’t sleep?” A tired voice asked.

  Tinvel jumped straight up, flinging his hands out of his jacket with a yelp.

  He recognized the ugh that followed. Straightening his jacket, he pstered on his best, sternest expression before he turned to face Chona.

  “Not really. What are you doing up? You never get out of bed before someone drags you to your feet.”

  She shrugged as she approached, emerging from the mist. Her jet-bck fur was difficult to pick out in the misty night, made worse by her habit of never wearing more than whatever was required to maintain her modesty. When he’d been reading books in the University’s library, Tinvel’s interest had been piqued by an account of Vanara culture. The author had cimed that in the nds where vanara were the majority, the ape-like people usually just trusted their fur to cover all the important bits. Supposedly they hated wearing clothes at all, and only begrudgingly did so when they traveled out of their homends. Tinvel could only imagine what his infuriating copilot would have been like if she hadn’t grown up somewhere more reasonable.

  Because she was already bad enough. What she did wear was barely considered clothes. He couldn’t bme her, not with how hot Tulian must be for someone covered head-to-toe in jet-bck fur, but really? Even now, in the misty chill, Chona wore a thin workman’s shirt that had been jaggedly cut right at the bottom of her sternum, held up by her breasts to dangle loosely over her skin, while her waist was covered by nothing more than a dark green triple-wrapped sash. Tinvel had to assume she wore something underneath the sash, some kind of shorts or something, but he’d never felt comfortable enough with the risk of getting charbroiled to try and figure it out.

  “I couldn’t sleep either,” Chona admitted, wandering out of the mist to stand beside him, staring up at the aerodrome’s wall. The simple blue words University Lab were embzoned in giant lettering. Beneath them, in red, were the much harsher words No Entry. For those who couldn’t read, this second bel helpfully included a drawing of a figure walking through the door, only to find another pointing a gun at it from the other side.

  “Nervous about the flight?” Tinvel asked.

  “No. I’m excited. Why, are you nervous?”

  “I think it’d be kinda stupid not to be.”

  “Mm,” Chona hummed noncommittally.

  They stood in the mist for a little while more, side by side.

  “Big building,” Chona said, tapping a foot on the stones.

  “Yeah.”

  “Biggest in the city.”

  “By far,” Tinvel agreed. Then he dipped his head to the side, squinting. “Well, at least if you rank by continuous internal volume. The University or the old King’s Keep might be bigger in terms of total footprint.”

  “I dunno. This pce is pretty damn big. And it didn’t take a hundred years to build.”

  “It didn’t even take a hundred days.”

  “Yeah. Crazy.”

  They kept standing in the mist, breaths pushing the clouds of drifting droplets away from their mouths in little puffs.

  “Welp,” Chona eventually said, patting her thighs, “not doing us much good being not-tired here, instead of not-tired in there.”

  “No, I guess not. Want to see if we can get the pre-flight checklist done early?”

  “You’re still gonna make us do it again before we take off.”

  “Yeah, but this way we’ll have longer to fix a problem if we find one.”

  Chona took in a long breath, looked about one st time, as if searching for an excuse to avoid the work, then blew it out with a shrug.

  “Fine, I guess. Not like there’s anything better to do at this time of night.”

  Tinvel pulled out his key as they walked up to the doors, sliding it into pce. He knew there would be guards right on the other side, but he never bothered knocking. The guards didn’t know everyone who was or wasn’t allowed in, so the rules were simple: if you didn’t have a key, you weren’t getting in.

  The key turned. The lock clicked. Tinvel pulled.

  The door didn’t open.

  Chona raised an eyebrow at him.

  Tinvel twisted the key in the lock a bit tighter, then jerked against the handle again.

  Nothing budged.

  “Let me,” Chona said.

  “You think I can’t open a door?”

  “I mean–”

  “Shut up. It’s stuck or something.”

  “Maybe for you,” Chona said, bumping him aside with a hip as she took over, bracing one hand on the wall. “All you need to do is just- ngh–”

  The door jumped open–

  Only to sm shut again.

  Someone holding it shut on the other side.

  Tinvel looked at Chona. The vanara girl’s lips split, baring her teeth in a decidedly unfriendly grin. The hand she’d braced against the wall slid over to the center of the door and began to glow, fmes licking at its edges.

  “Hey, guards! If you’re still in there, you’re gonna want to get away from the door. To the left or right, preferably. Because it’s about to not exist.”

  “Wait!” Came a muffled cry from the other side of the door. “Wait, wait, no!”

  The door swung open, revealing one very sheepish-looking Elusi, two guards behind her looking anywhere but forward.

  “The hells are you doing here, Elusi?” Chona demanded, smming the door all the way open as she bodily shoved her way past the shorter girl.

  Tinvel followed after her, more politely turning aside so he wouldn’t brush up against Elusi. She was wearing her usual affair of a tool-filled smock, which covered up most of the grass-stains she ended up with on her constant hunt for insects to study. Tinvel liked her well enough. She was one of the few University students as committed to Artificery as he was, eschewing the more populous Artificer’s Union in favor of the wider education Garen and Professor Brown could provide. She was one of the st people he’d expected to be up so early, since she usually spent her evenings crawling through the dirt in search of the perfect insect to study for future aerial enchantments.

  As Tinvel entered, she skirted to one side, stretching up on her tiptoes, as if to hide something behind her.

  Tinvel narrowed his eyes at her, opening his mouth to say something, but Chona beat him to it, unsurprisingly.

  “The hells were you thinking?” The vanara demanded, stepping into Elusi’s personal space with a scowl. “I thought someone had broken into the aerodome. If I didn’t give you a warning, I could have killed you.”

  “We didn’t expect you to be up so early!” She squeaked, retreating from Chona. “Seriously, who gets up at four in the morning?”

  “We?” Tinvel asked, looking up over her head.

  “Oh, fuck no,” Chona growled.

  The pne– their pne, the pne they’d spent weeks building– was sitting at the far end of the aerodome, a gaggle of students surrounding it. They all had paintbrushes in their hands, buckets at their feet, and very, very guilty expressions on their faces.

  Because the entire right side of the pne, fusege and both wings, had been freshly sthered with garish orange-red paint.

  “You’re too te!” A voice called, echoing in the cavernous emptiness of the hangar. “The deed’s already been done!”

  “The hells did you do?” Tinvel demanded, feet carrying him forward with anger roiling in his gut.

  “We gave it a fresh coat of paint!” Affe responded cheerfully, maintaining an innocent smile even as the others scattered from Chona and Tinvel’s advance, a school of fish parting around a marauding shark.

  Chona stomped up to Affe, gring up at the taller boy. Everyone in the building save the guards was a university student, of a simir age and dress, but Affe still stood out among them. He was aiming to be a battle mage, ignoring that the Governess had forbidden any of Tulian’s precious mages “wasting their lives on war.” He’d persisted in his efforts to sculpt himself into one. He had deeply tanned skin and an impressive set of muscles, both earned by his routine of spending his free hours copying the army’s training exercises in the University courtyard. Tall, muscur, talented, and still far cockier than any of his accomplishments could justify, his spellcasting was just barely good enough for Tinvel to not hate him outright.

  “We thought it’d be helpful!” Affe cimed, hands folded behind his back in mock politeness. “What’s the matter? Should we have added some beling, too?”

  “That’s… you…!” Chona’s lips were peeled back in a uniquely vanara grimace, thick incisors gnashing beneath her beady eyes.

  “What?” Affe asked innocently. “We thought you’d appreciate a reminder of what not to do.”

  Tinvel got it, of course. It was a shitty paint job, but he got the joke.

  They’d been trying to paint fmes across the entire right side of the pne. There were multiple buckets of cheap, watered-down paints scattered across the floor, most half-emptied. It looked like they’d started off trying to draw a wavy fire pattern on the wing, but had given up once it was clear the crappy paint was only running together into a blurry, semi-transparent mess. Only when he squinted could he see what they’d originally been going for.

  “That pne was expensive, you know. And crashing it meant it’s taking the rest of us even longer to get in the air. So I think we’ve earned a little bit of fun.”

  “Oh, you think you would’ve done better?” Chona demanded.

  Affe raised his eyebrows. “Uh, yeah. I do. That’s why I asked Garen to send me on this mission instead of Tin–”

  Chona’s dark scowl erupted into a lip-bearing fury in the middle of the sentence, her right arm flying up, bright fmes lighting her dark fur.

  “Woah!” Tinvel lunged forward, dragging Chona’s arm back down. She fought him, firefly sparks flying from her fingertips as she gnashed her teeth.

  “I swear to Tavan, let go of me so I can cook his ass!”

  “It’s just a shitty joke, Chona, rex!” Tinvel urged, doing his best to keep her spell pointed away from the pne. Affe was a secondary concern.

  Affe kept smiling at the pne as if nothing was happening at all. “Really, I think it’ll look good. One red half like that? It’s certainly memorable.”

  “It’s a fucking insult is what it is,” Chona snapped. Tinvel had finally managed to get her arm down, but he couldn’t do anything for the gre running Affe through. “What made you think you had the right to fuck with our pne?”

  Our? Tinvel noted, surprised. That was a first. She’d always called it his pne.

  “Do you even know what’s in that paint?” Chona demanded, ignorant of Tinvel’s shock. “Where the hells did you even buy it? What if it ruins the cotton dope?”

  “Musin checked it out first, it’ll be fine,” Affe replied dismissively, referring to one of the University’s only alchemist students. “It just needs to dry before you take off. Seriously, calm down. It’s no big deal.”

  Chona’s mouth bobbed open and shut for a time before clicking shut, rage robbing her of words.

  Tinvel hung his head, rubbing his eyes. “At least finish the job, alright? Paint that half all the way red. At least that way it won’t look like you squeezed fruit juice all over it. Go get everyone that ran and get them back over here, so it’ll at least be done before we have to get flying.”

  Affe rolled his eyes, zily turning around to go collect his cohorts. Tinvel didn’t care how rudely he left, as long as he actually did what he was told.

  Chona, still muttering profanities under her breath, went up to the pne, running her hands over the untarnished portions of its canvas, searching for inadvertent damage.

  Tinvel joined her in the inspection, even though he didn’t expect to find anything. Half the kids at the university (was it weird of him to think of them as kids, when they were mostly a year or two younger than him?) were part of the nascent flight program. Even those who hadn’t actively helped build the pnes still wanted to fly in one some day. He’d bet all of his non-existent savings that this was an honest, innocent prank.

  But it was a prank that highlighted one of Chona’s mistakes, and there was no world in which she’d take that well.

  Tinvel made an effort to keep to himself as they went about preparing the world’s second pne for its first true long-distance flight, even as the others returned to finish the botch-job they’d started. Considering the fact that they’d left just long enough to let a yer of the paint dry, he suspected it was going to look even worse than it would have originally.

  As long as it flew, Tinvel didn’t care.

  Even after putting a dozen hours of test flights into it over the st week, Tinvel still couldn’t settle his nerves over the upcoming flight. The further he had developed his Artifice Engine, the more and more they’d been forced to divorce themselves from the proven designs of Professor Brown’s home.

  Earthly pnes, Sara had finally allowed Tinvel to learn, relied on dense, fmmable fuel, which would be ignited within steel tubes so the resulting explosion could throw the rest of the contraption into motion. That meant their engines were heavy, they were filled with heavy fuel tanks, and they were always limited by their ability to acquire more of the fmmable fluid. Every one of the pnes that Professor Brown knew of worked within those parameters, limited by those principals as much they were bolstered.

  Thus, Tinvel could no longer steal the designs of earthly pnes. He and Professor Brown had started off trying to copy a pne called the Bristol F2, a fighter pne with a rear gunner’s seat that would work just as well for a mage, but they’d quickly realized it just wasn’t going to work. The entire pne was designed around the size, weight, and pcement of an engine and its fuel. By the professor’s estimate, those two items accounted for a third the pne’s weight.

  Conversely, Tinvel’s Artifice Engine, made of nothing more than crystals and a few well-pced steel mechanisms, didn’t weigh much more than thirty pounds overall. There was no way to mimic the Bristol F2’s lines without ruining any sembnce of stability.

  It was almost a relief. Freed from the constraints of copying another world’s designs, they’d ended up creating a pne very unlike any earthly equivalent. Maybe even one that was better.

  Without the need for a bulky engine in the nose of the pne, the canvas had been pinched down to a tapered, aerodynamic point, a single steel driveshaft poking out to spin a four-bded prop. Compared to the Bristol F2 they’d begun with, the pne was much smaller. The wingspan had been sshed from forty feet to thirty, its length from twenty-five feet to twenty. The weight reduction had allowed Tinvel to cut out a hole in the upper wing over his head, improving vertical visibility, and Chona’s seat behind him had been enrged, given a redundant set of flight controls. There was also now a sliding hatch in the floor between Chona’s legs, a small door that would allow her to shoot fmes directly below without the worry of aiming so far forward. There were even cmps on the underside of the wings, empty pincers that could be opened with the flip of a lever, eagerly awaiting weapons that hadn’t yet been invented.

  But what really separated their new pne from its Great War ancestor was its underside.

  Instead of two tough rubber wheels dangling from spindly nding gears, two massive pontoons had been put in their pce. Made of the lightest wood Tulian’s many forests had to offer, they ran from the tip of the nose halfway down the tail, with four rubber wheels attached to either side, protruding just low enough that it was still possible to nd and take off on nd. The rear of the pontoons had tiny little rudders attached to let them control their direction on water without accelerating to flight speeds.

  Because the pontoons had to be thick enough to keep the entire pne buoyant, the newest pne was much taller than the previous, which meant they needed a dder to get up into the cockpit.

  After assuring themselves that the other students hadn’t ruined anything, Tinvel and Chona began their pre-pre-flight checklist. Unlike the early weeks of their nascent flight program, there was no thought of skipping steps.

  “Rudder right, rudder left,” Tinvel said, working the pedals accordingly.

  “Confirmed,” Chona confirmed, scratching a mark on her checklist.

  “Elevator up, elevator down.”

  “Confirmed.”

  “Right aileron up, right aileron down.”

  “Confirmed.”

  And so it went, the lightless hours of the morning spent with the two of them rigorously testing everything they could without starting the pne. The rest of the students who had been involved with the “prank” slowly trickled back to finish their job.

  Tinvel was adamant that they were going to, too. Because today was going to be a very important day.

  Today would be the first day they took off from within the city itself.

  Right around daybreak, a group of Tulian Guards arrived with heaps of rifles carried in canvas bags, following Tinvel’s instructions on how to stow them inside the empty pontoons. Thanks to the aid of the Artificer’s Guild, whose Carrion members were intimately familiar with enchantments to simultaneously lighten and strengthen wood, the pontoons had enough excess buoyancy to serve as impromptu storage spaces. It threw off the pne’s bance a tad, but it wasn’t anything he couldn’t compensate for.

  It was maybe an hour after sunrise when they were well and truly ready. They’d checked, double-checked, and triple-checked everything they could. Several of the students went over to one of the aerodrome’s rge cargo doors and began shoving them open, sunlight spilling into the dim interior.

  Outside, a crowd began to roar.

  Tinvel had known Sara was going to make a big deal out of this moment, but that didn’t mean he was happy about it. The Tulian Paper Press had distributed a record-breaking number of pamphlets overnight, pstering every occupied home in the city with a notice of the upcoming ‘miracle’.

  Tinvel took a deep breath as a mule was hitched up to the front of the pne, tugging it forward. He squinted as they turned into the sun, emerging into the wide street that separated the University and Aerodrome.

  Thousands of men and women were lining the edges of the streets, many stuffed into the windows of abandoned homes. The city Guard was trying its utmost to keep them out of the way, but occasionally someone would break free, trying to get a better view of the pne. They were always dragged back in short order, but even a few seconds would be too much. Tinvel hoped none of them would be stupid to leap out during his takeoff run.

  Affe, leading the mule that was pulling the pne, swung them to the left in a slow sweep, showing off the golden bel scrawled across the fusege.

  Unseen, but heard by everyone in the city, town crier’s voices echoed up and down the packed streets, reading off the script the Governess had prepared.

  “Before you stands mankind’s first foray into the skies under our own power! Capable of crossing a hundred miles in an hour, soaring two miles over nd and ocean alike, you look upon the aircraft Sunrise! The end of every Knight!”

  The golden sun embzoned on the fusege seemed to shimmer in time to the Governess’ words, while the right-sided tint was dripping into a deeper shade with every passing minute, drying better than Tinvel had ever expected. What had started as a pale, noxious orange had seeped into a vibrant red.

  The Tulian people cheered wildly as the mule was unhitched, even if they didn’t have the slightest idea what they were looking at. Sure, some may have heard the rumors from the city Guards that had protected the pnes, and Tinvel wouldn’t have been surprised if his test flights had been caught on occasion, but that was too few people for the rumor to have spread so far. Most everyone was ignorant of what they were looking at, yet they cheered anyway. It had the Governess’ endorsement, and that was enough.

  “Ready for wind start?” Tinvel muttered, trying to ignore the roaring crowd.

  “Ready,” Chona said, leaning forward. With the propeller now in the front of the pne, she had to lean forward, resting her arm on his shoulder.

  “Mark,” Tinvel said, pressing a pulse into the crystals.

  “Mark!” Chona echoed, slicing her hand down.

  A roar of wind ripped down, smming into the propeller bdes. They whirred to life just as Tinvel pulsed energy into the enchantments, urging them forward.

  “Soar,” he whispered.

  With a rattling cnk that shook the entire pne, crystals burst to life. He kept both feet pressing down on the brakes while switching back to the first of five speeds he could now select, stopping the pne from skittering down the cobblestone street. The crowd’s etion was just barely audible over the engine, which was louder than it had ever been.

  With knowledge of how combustion engines used to work, Tinvel had finally been freed from his primitive pulse-strike propulsion method. Now twelve crystals had been set into pce around one far rger, central gemstone, each smaller piece summoning a glowing pilr to push a piston forward, drawing energy from the central gemstone. He had taken the best of both world’s technology: the barbaric detonations of fming oil had been repced by elegant enchantments, powering the beautifully optimized series of pistons and gears which could drive the propeller to speeds yet unseen.

  “Ready?!” Tinvel called to Chona, shouting over cnking steel and the whir of the propeller bdes.

  “Ready!” She called back.

  They had a quarter mile of straight road to use as a runway, technically more than enough for the pne, but it ended in a stone two-story building. If they’d miscalcuted the rifle’s weight, the engine’s power, or even if there was a sudden gust of wind, things could go very, very wrong.

  Tinvel grinned, pressing his thumb to the very end of the crystal speed dial.

  Rubber screeched as the propeller disappeared in an invisible blur, so much power being pumped into the engine that the brakes could no longer hold them back. He released them an instant ter, then they were off, rattling down the freshly-repaired cobblestone street.

  Faces passed in a blur to either side, hundreds of cheering, waving people, but Tinvel couldn’t pay them any mind. He listened to the way the wind whistled through the wings, felt it against his skin, waiting for the very moment that he had enough speed to-

  Tinvel jerked back on the control column, throwing the bipne into the air. He heard a scrape from below as the rear of the pontoons contacted the ground, but then he was up and away, roaring a hundred feet over the rooftop of the building he’d been worried he might not be able to clear.

  Chona joined the crowd below with a loud cheer of her own, pumping her fist in the air.

  Tinvel grinned, banking the pne to the right, drawing a slow loop over the city. It wasn’t quite as maneuverable as the first, what with the massive pontoons adding gods-knew-how-much drag, particurly on the roll axis, but it was still far, far faster. They still didn’t have a good way to measure midair speed, but he’d bet good money it was thirty percent faster than the original.

  As proven by the way Tinvel completed his loop of the city in under a minute, once more over the street where people were still staring up in abject shock, shading their eyes against the morning sun.

  Before he could think better of it, Tinvel tipped the control column forward, dropping them into a shallow dive. He expected Chona to scream, to protest, but instead she just ughed wildly, as excited as he was to finally have the world witnessing all their work.

  As he continued his slow dive, the lower wing dipped beneath the top of the roofs, then the upper, until he was flying so low that he made the briefest fsh of eye contact with someone watching from a second story window, astonishment as much on their face as his.

  The engine echoed oddly in the trench formed by the university and aerodrome, drowning out anything but the hum of chopped air and Tinvel’s own eted ughter. Just when he reached the end of the street again, about to crash into the same house, Tinvel hauled back, throwing the pne into a ninety-degree climb.

  They’d done some static tests, back before the first flight, to determine the pne’s thrust-to-weight ratio. The more thrust a light pne had, the more you could do with it. You could accelerate faster, lose speed slower in a climb, and most importantly of all, worry less about stalling out and falling to the ground. According to Professor Brown, most bipnes had atrocious ratios, their engines two or three hundred pounds, their load made worse by the extra hundreds of pounds of fuel they gulped down.

  The Sunrise’s artifice engine weighed thirty-five pounds.

  They rocketed up into the sky, the city receding beneath them by the second. Tinvel whooped with joy as they climbed, climbed, climbed, until the city was five hundred feet below right around the time he started to feel the effects of loss of control, too little airflow over the wings.

  Tinvel kicked the rudder left, tipping the pne over on its side. For a moment, he felt weightless, hanging like a star in the sky.

  Then gravity reasserted itself, helped by the roar of the engine as they began a dive right down the path they’d ascended, wind returning in a rush that filled his mind as much as it did his ears.

  When they’d accelerated enough for the pne to maintain level flight, Tinvel pulled out of the dive, aiming for the harbor. Masts of ships blurred past two hundred feet below as he aimed for a northerly course, disappearing from the city.

  “You got the map memorized?” Tinvel called to Chona.

  “Yeah! Fuck if I know how good it is, though!”

  “We’ve still got the crystals! If we can’t find Nora where she’s supposed to be, we can nd and talk to her!”

  “Alright!”

  Tinvel settled back into his seat as he began a leisurely climb to five thousand feet, thinking through his pns. They were on their way to Admiral Nora, who was out patrolling Tulian waters.

  They had a mutiny to fake.