In the raised instrument gallery overlooking the central core of the Star tower, the air was dense with the smell of scorched machine oil, wet coal dust, and the biting tang of strong etching acid. Through the heavy watching slits of salt-glass, the central pit stretched eighty feet below, lit up by the dying amber glare of the main release chimney pipes. On the central instrument board, four upright pressure gauge columns of polished brass housed tubes of heavy liquid silver that tracked the heat-powered pulse of the province.
Chancellor Ves Morn stood with his manicured hands resting on the cold brass railing of the watching deck. His face was the color of unbaked dough, his thin lips pulled back from his teeth in a tight, bloodless grimace of wild arithmetic. For twelve years, Morn had ruled Rookvale from this high gallery, padded by triple-sealed inner walls, warm citrus greenhouses. An office rig that reduced human agony to columns of neatly inked town scrip.
Now, the numbers on his brass instruments were deserting him.
The main liquid silver column had plunged through fourteen hundred units, through twelve hundred, and was now hovering at one thousand and forty units. Nearly seventy percent of the tightly packed solar charge—twelve years of stolen daylight held captive beneath the sky shield—had already bled through the dark rock chimney pipes into the flooded heat sink of the lower quarry. The salt-glass panels made by Melli Dorn’s kilns had not fractured. The water jacket kept by…
