The figure sitting beneath the bronze valve housing didn’t have a shadow.
In the blinding, blazing bright violet-red glare streaming from the cherry-red copper floorplates, every contour of the eight-sided chamber was cast in harsh, specular relief. The firebrick walls glowed dull orange. The riveted seams of the twenty-inch steam main shone behind waves of rising heat distortion. And yet beneath the crossed legs of the gray-coated courier, the metal plates remained uniformly radiant, fully unbaffled by the presence of a human body.
The creature was not absorbing light. It was an energetic sink. It drew the heat overspill directly from the copper power bars into its physical matrix.
Len knelt at the threshold of the chamber, his boots pinned to the last unheated firebrick tier, his palms flat against the bronze wrench clutched against his ribs.
His heart was hammering in his ears with the violent, irregular rhythm of a loose pump piston. Every instinct in his young body—every buried living reflex that had evolved to keep a creature from walking into an open fire—screamed at him to kick his heels backward, to scramble through the thirty-inch chimney pipe, to claw his way up the iron ladder into the cool, cinder-laden air of the casting bay.
