The Specter in the Steam

Starvation tasted like burnt tin.

For three weeks, the primary arc-lamp had roared at thirty thousand candlepower, drinking every drop of ambient dusk from our side of the silvering. My ribs showed through my hide. The marrow in my bones felt dry and brittle, hollowed out by the ceaseless glare of human machinery. If the beacon kept burning, I would unravel into a mindless specter like Oighrig and the rest of the starving dead.

I needed terror to anchor my flesh. Human fear was rich, dense, and full of raw psychic resonance.

And I had a glazier right in front of me.

I stood behind the mercuric salts of the twelve-foot lens, wearing her skin like a stolen coat. I had her broad shoulders, her dark hair pinned with brass rods, her grease-streaked jaw. I held her exact scowl, then twisted it into a grin.

Clink. Clink.

My claw tapped the inside of the leaded quartz. The vibrations rippled across the curve, sending sharp rings through the glass.

Ealasaid didn't scream.

She didn't drop her chamois cloth. She didn't stumble backward and tumble off the gantry. Most humans lost their balance at the first sign of a lagging reflection. They would clutch their temples, babble about optical madness, and run for the lift cage.

Instead, she squinted.

Her gray eyes narrowed at the glass with pure, indignant irritation. Her knuckles tightened on the cloth. Her breathing hitched, but her pulse didn't spike with the sweet, frantic gallop of prey.

"Get out of the light," I hissed through the silvering. The words didn't cross into the air; they scraped directly along the surface of her mind like a rusty file.

She blinked hard, rubbing the bridge of her nose with a soot-stained thumb. "Too much carbon monoxide," she muttered to the empty air. "The vent flap must be sticking again."

Insufferable mortal.

I pressed both hands flat against the cold interior face of the quartz. If a whisper wouldn't shatter her composure, the abyss would. I reached into the refraction of the lantern light, gathering the glare and twisting it inside out.

It took an effort that made my skin peel. I forced my biology to refract the beam, projecting a waking nightmare straight into her optic nerves.

To her eyes, the steel floor of the lantern room dissolved.

I stripped away the solid world. The catwalk vanished into a bottomless chasm of black air. The roar of the boiler fell silent, replaced by the howling wind of the void between the Shards. Below her boots lay nothing: twelve thousand leagues of empty sky, waiting to swallow her whole.

Every human had nightmares of falling from the plates. It was the ancestral rot buried in their blood. The illusion was absolute, perfect in every sensory detail. She should have dropped to her knees. She should have wept.

Ealasaid wobbled on the balls of her feet.

Her left boot slipped an inch on the steel grating. Her hand shot out, grasping the iron safety railing with enough force to turn her knuckles white.

Fall, I pushed against her skull. The iron is gone. The ground is dead. Fall.

She squeezed her eyes shut for three rapid counts. Her chest rose and fell in ragged bursts. A tremor went through her calves, the biological response of a creature standing on the brink of death.

Then she took a deep, deliberate breath.

She didn't let go of the rail. In fact, she leaned harder against it. Her heavy leather gloves creaked as she gripped the iron. The heavy vibration from the boiler below shuddered through her palms, and she held fast, as if grounding herself against the mechanical throb.

She kept her eyes closed and began to speak out loud, her voice flat and rhythmic.

"Eighty-two pounds at the float valve," she said, pacing each word to the heavy mechanical throb under her feet. "Gimbal assembly torqued to forty foot-pounds. Exhaust flue clear. Manifold pulsing at twelve beats a minute."

She stamped her right heel down against the catwalk.

Clang.

The solid ring of iron echoed through the chamber, cutting right through my telepathic gale.

"The platform is three-inch rolled steel," she said to herself, her jaw clenched tight. "Steel doesn't vanish because you skipped breakfast, Ealasaid. Get your head straight."

She opened her eyes.

The void hallucination was still howling around her, darkness swirling where the walls should be, but she refused to look down. She kept her gaze fixed on the brass pressure dial mounted to the main bypass pipe. She watched the needle pulse steadily at eighty-two.

One pulse. Two pulses.

With every measured beat of the boiler, the illusion thinned. The howling wind died away. The iron walls of the lantern room flickered back into view, solid and grease-stained. The void dissolved, leaving only the mundane reek of tallow and scorched coal.

I recoiled inside the silvering, clutching my chest.

The effort had cost me half of my remaining strength. My throat burned with dry ash. Instead of gorging on her terror, I had swallowed nothing but her stubborn, gritty pragmatism. It sat in my gut like a mouthful of gravel.

She exhaled a long, shaky breath, wiped her sleeve across her damp forehead, and shook her head.

"Need to get the air filters checked," she muttered, stuffing the chamois into her apron pocket. "Murchadh's going to hear about these bad seals."

Judging by her muttered complaints, she blamed bad air for her dizzy spell.

I stared at her through the glass. A strange sensation prickled beneath my scales—not just the ache of starvation, but a sharp, biting spark of curiosity. Humans were usually fragile things, easily herded by nightmares into the dark corners where my kin could feast. But this woman was as unyielding as the brass fixtures she polished.

Fear wouldn't drive her away from the lantern controls.

If terror had no purchase on her mind, I needed another lever. Humans were creatures of hierarchy. They ignored their own senses, but they obeyed uniforms and ranks.

I let the reflection of her face melt away.

The dark hair dissolved into coarse gray stubble. Her lean shoulders thickened, expanding into the heavy, stooped frame of an older man. I warped my skin, mimicking the oil-stained canvas coat, the stiff posture, and the scarred neck of Murchadh, her shift overseer.

I stepped into the shallow plane of the glass, letting the heavy, iron-shod boots of my new form strike the invisible floor.

"Glazier Ealasaid," I rasped, shaping my voice to match the grating bark of the overseer in her memories. "Step away from the lens and vent the primary arc. We're shutting the beacon down."