Shadows in the Silvering

Glaziers were supposed to scream when my kin broke through the glass, but the woman with the fourteen-inch spanner was already scraping crystalline marrow off the welt of her boot.

I watched her from the circular face of the secondary pressure dial. To Ealasaid, I was a sliver of darkness trapped beneath curved mineral glass, my outline flickering under the harsh yellow glare of the sodium burners. To me, the boiler house was a jagged web of angles and corridors. Every polished brass elbow, every damp smear of condensed tallow on the catwalk railing offered me a doorway.

"And right now, you won't even make it to the upper valves," I murmured, vibrating the dial's needle against its brass stop. The sharp click echoed off the iron plating. "Not with your intake pipe about to rupture."

Ealasaid didn't jump. She didn't drop her tool. Her thumb hooked into the heavy canvas sling at her hip, her gray eyes locking onto the dial with the flat, murderous patience of an exterminator eyeing a roach in the flour bin. A dark bead of blood oozed from the claw mark across her collarbone, staining the frayed wool beneath her leather apron.

"I can handle my pipes," she said, her voice dry as chimney ash. "And if I want warnings about what's coming, I'll ask someone with a pulse and a permanent address."

She kicked the last chunk of silver sand through the gantry grating. It tumbled fifty fathoms into the howling void beneath the First Shard, winking out like dead stars before it hit the clouds.

Above our heads, the manifold shuddered.

A deep, wet thrum vibrated through the high steam leads, rattling the brass studs in my reflection. The auxiliary valve on the upper intake had seized. I could feel the heat expanding behind the plate—five hundred pounds of live vapor baking against brittle seals. If the casting split, the explosion would tear the lantern housing from the disc and cast forty thousand square yards of glass into the abyss.

And worse: the sudden dark would draw Oighrig's swarm like flies to an open belly.

"The bypass counterweight is jammed against the upper flange," I said, sliding my silhouette from the gauge, across the grease-filmed brass conduit, and into the polished surface of a three-inch drain petcock two feet from her ear. "Your reach is four inches too short from the ladder. You climb up there with that wrench, and the back-pressure blows the packing ring through your throat."

Ealasaid wiped her forearm across her forehead, leaving a streak of black graphite across her pale temple. "Then I'll use the extension pole."

"The pole is copper-sheathed cedar," I replied, tilting my head in the reflection so my teeth caught the lantern light. "It will snap before you break the torque. You have ninety seconds before the thermal expansion shears the brass bolts. Then we both burn—or rather, you boil, and I lose my perch."

"A tragedy for the arts," she said without missing a beat. She set her boots firmly on the steel grating, leveling the cold end of her spanner at my reflection. "Why do you care if the pipe blows, Tighearnan? I thought your people liked the dark."

"We like the dusk," I corrected, narrowing my form to fit the narrow curvature of the pipe. "Starvation makes beasts out of princes, glazier. As I told you, Oighrig's pack does not negotiate. When this beacon fails, they will feed on whatever heat is left in your carcass, and then they will tear down the parabolic reflectors I intend to sleep behind."

She didn't blink. The pulse in the hollow of her throat was fast, sharp, but steady. A human clock counting down a mechanical catastrophe. Her eyes tracked the groaning joint above, assessing the angles of the shuddering manifold against the limits of her reach.

"So you want a truce," she said.

"I want you to turn the relief cock while I lift the counterweight," I said. "Two points of contact. Synchronized torque. Otherwise, the housing warps and we're both bathed in live steam."

"Fae don't have physical mass unless you breach the silvering," she countered, stepping closer, her jaw set hard. "And the last one that stepped out of the glass tried to take my windpipe home as a souvenir. What's my guarantee you won't turn into teeth the second your boots hit the iron?"

"You hold the blowdown lever," I said. "One yank, and sixty gallons of scalding alkali wash the plate behind me. You'll melt my footing into slag."

Her gaze flicked toward the brass lever three paces to her left, then returned to the reflection of my eyes in the pipe.

"That's leverage," she admitted. "Not a guarantee. I want something solid."

"Time is gone, Ealasaid."

"Then push," she commanded. "Show me you can hold iron without breaking."

I didn't argue. Argument was a waste of breath, and breath was a luxury I had to steal from the ambient warmth of her machine.

I gathered the scattered refractions of the lantern room, pulling my marrow together from the sheen of grease and the mirror-polished brass. The transition from light to flesh was a violent tearing—the chill of the human world biting into my skin like needles of frost.

I drove my right arm forward, shoving it straight through the surface of the brass drain pipe.

The boundary broke with the brittle sound of ice fracturing under a boot. Air hit my skin—smelling of scorching sulfur, bitter chicory, and the salty musk of her sweat. My fingers solidified, gray-skinned and tipped with black, obsidian-hard nails, wrapping instantly around the cold iron handle of the emergency valve wrench she had left wedged into the lower manifold.

The sheer weight of the physical world dragged at my shoulder, an agonizing pull that threatened to shatter my cohesion. My knuckles locked white against the rusted iron.

Ealasaid didn't flinch away. She stepped right into my reach, her shoulder brushing against my newly solid forearm, and clamped both hands over the wrench beside mine. Her living heat burned against my frozen skin like an open furnace door.

"On three," she said, her grip unrelenting. "And if you slip, I'll take your hand off at the wrist."

"Count, glazier," I ground out between sharp teeth. "Before I change my mind."