Blindness and Biology

Superheated steam does not care about ancient lineages or the vanity of mirrors.

When the copper ring blew, the sound did not travel through the air as noise. It struck through the iron grating under my boots as a physical hammer. The blast pulverized what little focus I had left, tearing through the lantern house in a blinding wall of opaque white vapor.

The light died instantly. Not because the arc extinguished, but because ten thousand cubic feet of pressurized mist scattered the beam into a flat, blinding glare. Direct illumination vanished. Without a clean ray of light to refract my cells, the stolen human shape I wore began to melt off my bones.

I needed the human alive. If Ealasaid boiled to death on this gantry, her beacon died with her. If the beacon died, my people starved in the dark void below, and Oighrig’s feral dogs would strip my marrow before sunrise.

"Move!" I barked into the roar, lunging forward through the fog.

My voice sounded wrong. The smooth vocal cords I had copied from her memories shredded into a hollow, multi-tonal rasp.

My spine lengthened with a series of wet, snapping cracks. The illusion of tailored wool and smooth skin dissolved into cold, translucent keratin. My shoulder blades forced their way outward, blooming into chitinous ridges designed to catch refraction in deep caverns, not to fit inside a human coat. Five fingers warped into elongated talons, bone dense as obsidian and tipped with serrated glass-cutters.

This was what lay behind the silvering. A predator built for twilight, exposed without the cloak of human vanity.

I felt her nearby before I could see her. Her scent was unmistakable amidst the sulfurous cloud: machine grease, scorched denim, and the sharp copper tang of stubborn blood.

She was down on one knee five paces ahead, coughing violently into her leather sleeve. Her fourteen-inch steel spanner was still clutched in her right hand, but the concussive shock of the gasket blowout had shoved her backward against the safety rail.

"Get up, glazier," I rasped, my throat clicking on the consonants.

Ealasaid did not look up. She was coughing violently into her sleeve against the scorching air. Her left hand groped blindly along the catwalk rail, seeking the escape ladder that was no longer there. The falling counterweight had sheared the upper rung clean off when the rust seal broke.

A high-pitched shriek tore through the hiss of the escaping steam.

To human ears, it was just deafening mechanical noise. To my biological sensors, the acoustics mapped the gantry in sharp, vibrating geometry. The primary brass manifold above us was bulging. The safety bracket had twisted forty degrees under the thermal strain, and a thick braided suspension cable was vibrating at a frequency that meant instant rupture.

If that cable snapped under tension, the whipping steel braid would saw her in half.

I drove my legs forward. The extra joints in my hocks kicked against the iron floor, propelling me through the boiling vapor. The scalding heat bit at my naked carapace, blistering the delicate optical receptors along my ribs, but pain was a tactical nuisance to be filed away for later.

I reached the vibrating cable two paces ahead of her. My transformed right claw clamped around the braided wire. Cold iron met living obsidian. I flexed my wrist, driving three hundred pounds of hydraulic jaw-force through my talons.

The steel strands screeched, then severed with a dull twang, flying wide into the steam instead of slicing through her neck.

The recoil drove me back onto one knee. The effort tore through my depleted energy reserves. Without ambient light to metabolize, my true form was heavy, sluggish, and violently unstable. My skin rippled in white waves, failing to hold either the human disguise or my native density.

Ealasaid shoved herself upright against the handrail. She wiped the condensate from her safety goggles with the back of her leather glove and turned.

She froze.

The steam swirled between us, thinned for a second by a downdraft from the overhead vent. In that narrow gap of clarity, she saw me.

Not the polished phantom of her foreman. Not the handsome face I had worn to test her nerve.

She was staring at seven feet of hunched, crystalline monstrosity. Faceless black chitin where my eyes should have been, jaws that unhinged in three vertical plates, and hands that looked like iron gardening shears dipped in mercury.

I waited for the scream.

I braced myself for the wild swing of her fourteen-inch spanner. Every human I had ever encountered in the outer colonies responded to our true anatomy with either paralyzing terror or suicidal frenzy.

Ealasaid blinked through the water dripping from her eyelashes. Her chest hitched once. Her gaze traveled from my serrated claws up to my multi-jointed shoulders, then straight to the jagged jaw plates clicking in the heat.

"Gods above," she wheezed, her voice raspy from inhaled grit. "You're hideous."

Before I could process the insult, her gaze shifted to the wall behind my shoulder.

A secondary steam pipe in the lower collector ruptured with a sharp crack. A jet of pure, invisible superheated vapor began shredding the iron planking two feet to my left.

I was too drained to pivot my heavier stance in time.

Ealasaid did not back away. She did not raise her spanner in defense.

She lunged forward, grabbed my elongated, clawed wrist with both gloved hands, and threw her entire body weight backward into the mist.

The force of her haul dragged my off-balance bulk across the wet plating just as the invisible steam jet sliced through the iron where my thigh had been resting half a second before. Sparks and molten slag sprayed across the heels of my boots.

We tumbled together onto the rusted gantry grating, sliding hard into the base of the lantern-room bulkhead.

My claws dug into the deck to stop our skid. My predatory instincts flared, every nerve urging me to pin the fragile creature beneath me and secure my perimeter. But when I looked down, she was already letting go of my wrist, rolling onto her side, and checking the pressure valve on her utility belt.

She looked at my monstrous hand, then looked up into my unhinged jaw plates with pure, exhausted fury.

"If you stand in the kill zone like a broken mannequin, I can't keep this light running," she yelled over the shrieking pipes. "Get your overgrown carcass against the hatch!"

I stared at her for two full beats. A strange, sharp spike of amusement cut through the burning agony in my carapace.

"You have no sense of decorum, glazier," I growled, digging my talons into the steel hatch frame to haul both of us upright.

"Decorum is for people with working boilers," she retorted, slapping the emergency release dog with her wrench.

Together, we threw our combined weight against the heavy iron blast door, shoving it shut against the howling gale and dropping the locking bar into its cradle. The deafening roar of the steam blowout muffled into a low, thrumming vibration through the reinforced bulkhead.

Inside the sealed vestibule, the air was hot and dry, illuminated by the harsh, direct flare of the primary light chamber. My chitin clicked against the steel floor as I steadied my breath, watching her wipe soot from her cheek with the back of a blistered glove. She had seen the beast in the glass, stripped of every illusion, and had chosen to pull it to safety anyway.

I leaned my back against the locked hatch and folded my serrated claws across my chest, waiting for her to name her price.