The fifth leaf of the packet was different from the others. It was covered in clean, elegant geometrical drawings and school-taught algebra, written in dark blue dark oak-ink that had resisted the damp far better than Deren’s hasty pencil marks.
“These are Ansett Rill’s counts,” Urel said. He tapped the blue ink with the tip of his scraper knife. “Rill was the Chief Engineer for the Provincial Defense Council when the war started. He drafted the Sky Shield discharge protocol during the second week of the siege, sitting in a warm library in the country capital with two assistants bringing him hot tea.”
Len looked at the neat, balanced equations. Rill had calculated the heat fading away of the central solar collector using standard sky tables. A surrounding air heat of sixty degrees, a humidity index of forty percent, and a sky shield that had absorbed sky-high sunlight for exactly seventy-two hours.
Beside Rill’s tidy shape, Deren had dragged a heavy carpenter’s pencil across the page, scoring thick, jagged lines through the blue ink that had nearly torn through the rag paper.
Rill is a fool who calculates fire from a cool room, Deren had scrawled in the left margin. He assumes the quartz lens operates at sixty degrees Fahrenheit. He has never smelled salt-glass when three seasons of summer are tightly packed into a five-foot block. The lens is not glass anymore. It’s an oven. If you open the bypass at the rate his table specifies, the intake channels…
