The apex of the Spire was swinging through an arc of forty-four feet.
At one hundred thousand feet, the motion was not a violent jerk.
It was a slow, sickening swinging weight roll that made Giles Croft’s inner ears feel as though they were floating in cold broth.
Every twelve seconds, the steel floor tilted eastward toward the rising sun, groaned like a dying timber ship, paused in terrifying stillness. Then lurched back toward the west.
“Hold the pipe rim clamp steady,” Giles called out. He kept his voice dead level over the shrieking cryo-winds.
He stood on the staging deck of Mile Nineteen, his heavy canvas coveralls stiff with frozen vapor.
Below his boots, through the open zinc-coated bar grating, the blue curve of the world tilted from left to right with painful regularity.
Beside him, Master Borin Bronze-Lung spat over the edge into the clouds.
