The kettle began boiling without Felix getting out of bed.
For a moment, he lay under his blanket and listened to the little brass lid rattle. Steam escaped through the narrow pipe above the stove. The flame fell to a steady blue whisper. Nothing exploded.
Seven mornings of testing, one burned thumb, and an argument with a chimney had finally paid off.
“Civilization,” he said.
“Excellent,” said Barnaby. “You have saved eleven minutes. We can begin meridian exercises early.”
The clockwork owl stood on the bedpost with a book open between his brass feet. His amber eyes shone with the horrible confidence of someone who had never needed sleep.
Felix pulled the blanket over his head.
“Those eleven minutes belong to me.”
“Time cannot belong to a person.”
“Then stop trying to steal it.”
The kettle clicked off. Warmth drifted through the cottage, carrying the smell of yesterday’s toast. Outside, a loose shutter knocked against the wall. Felix had placed that on his list of future problems, below the shutter on the other side.
Barnaby turned a page with his beak.
“Grandmaster Frost recommended discipline.”
“Vivienne also recommended eating that blue mushroom.”
“She correctly identified it as nutritious.”
“I could hear colors.”
“Your hearing was temporarily improved.”
Felix sat up. The owl had won through sheer conversational danger.
His AetherDeck lay on the stool beside his bed, black glass held inside a scratched brass frame. He touched it. Two lines appeared beneath a picture of a slowly turning star.
Ambient reserve: thirty measures.
Safe release: one measure per breath.
The first number had taken six nights. The second refused to become more impressive just because he disliked it.
A separate corner of the screen offered a restoration bonus. He dismissed it. Yesterday it had asked him to identify a maintenance connection, and he had no intention of sticking mysterious wires into himself before breakfast.
He set his feet on the cold floor and guided a thin thread of qi through his lower belly. It circled the small, warm center of his dantian, traveled down his legs, and returned without catching beneath his ribs.
Forty nine days ago, he hadn’t possessed the vocabulary to describe any of that. Now he could repeat one breathing circuit without actively thinking about it. While he rested, it drew a little stellar qi through a copper loop beneath the windowsill.
He had checked the loop every evening for a week. It remained warm rather than hot. The cottage mice remained mice. That last check had seemed prudent.
On Earth, he had tested games for a living. Most people heard that and imagined he spent his days enjoying himself. Mostly he spent them making a door fail in the same way thirty times, then explaining why it would also fail for people who hadn’t attended the meeting.
He had been twenty nine when his heart stopped during an overnight shift.
He remembered a cold cup of coffee, a progress bar, and the thought that he ought to stand up. Whatever came after that remained mercifully blank.
This world offered different hazards. Its stairs sometimes ended in clouds. Its birds occasionally breathed fire. But the morning light came through a window, and nobody had yet asked him to describe his productivity before lunch.
He intended to preserve that last improvement.
Barnaby tapped the open page.
“You are looking at the ceiling.”
“I’m appreciating an architectural feature.”
“There is a spider.”
“A tenant who pays in flies. We have an arrangement.”
The owl looked up. The spider went about its business with the calm of a creature whose weekly targets were reasonable.
Felix admired that too.
He picked up his cup and checked the stove. The cutoff had worked. Tomorrow it would work again, provided he left the parts alone. Some improvements deserved to remain small, useful, and finished. He hoped to become very good at allowing that.
“Good,” Barnaby said. “Again, with your shoulders lowered.”
Felix lowered them.
“You could have said good first.”
“I did.”
“You said it in a corrective manner.”
He dressed in a clean shirt, stepped around the bucket beneath the leaking roof, and crossed to the stove. The cottage had three bedrooms, a narrow pantry, and a kitchen that served as its sitting room whenever nobody was cooking anything ambitious. A back door opened onto a small garden. The workshop leaned against the north wall as though borrowing strength from it.
Vivienne’s bedroom remained shut.
Felix looked at the door while he poured his tea. Forty seven days without a word. She had found him shivering beside a road, taken him home, and spent two days teaching him how not to die of his own new abilities. Then she had left a note saying she would return shortly.
He was beginning to have professional concerns about shortly.
“Do you think she’s in trouble?” he asked.
Barnaby’s claws tightened on the book.
“Grandmaster Frost has extensive experience with trouble.”
It was the answer he always gave. Felix let it stand this morning.
He buttered the last heel of bread. The kettle’s little glass gauge showed the pressure falling inside its sealed heating chamber. Tamsin Reed, the craftswoman down in the district, had insisted on the gauge and a separate brass release handle.
Felix had suggested trusting the automatic cutoff.
She had asked whether he wished to trust it with his face.
He had bought the handle.
Someone knocked on the door.
Barnaby looked delighted.
“Perhaps your dawn lessons have arrived in person.”
“If it’s discipline, tell it I died.”
The woman on the step wore an academy porter’s green coat and carried a flat leather document case. Gray hair escaped from her cap. Behind her, the path ran through weeds to the narrow stone bridge linking Solitude Spire to the academy’s western landing.
“Felix Vance?” she asked.
“Depends whether this is a bill.”
“Mara Bell. Notices and small deliveries. It’s not a bill.”
He relaxed.
“It’s an auction notice.”
Barnaby made a small, offended click.
Mara held out the paper without smiling. “I’d read it sitting down.”
The official seal showed seven towers under one sun. Beneath it, someone had described Felix as the unregistered occupant of a dormant instructional property.
That seemed unfair. He had learned a great deal about kettles here.
He read the date twice.
“Day Eleven?”
“Ten days from today,” Mara said. “Viewing opens after the safety inspection. Sale at noon.”
The bread in his hand suddenly looked like a poor investment.
“Vivienne owns this place.”
“The academy owns the land. Her charter allowed residence and teaching. The renewal wasn’t filed.”
Barnaby flew down from the bedpost and landed beside the notice.
“The charter permits an absence of ninety days.”
“And requires an annual teaching declaration. That expired before she left. I’m sorry.”
She sounded as though she meant it. Felix abandoned the argument he had been preparing against her hat.
“Can I pay whatever’s missing?”
Mara pointed at a figure near the bottom.
He opened the drawer beside the stove. Eleven silver pieces, six copper pennies, a bent needle, and a button he had been meaning to identify.
The renewal charge was sixty silver. The auction deposit was one hundred.
He closed the drawer gently, in case sudden movement made the figures worse.
“Do they accept buttons?”
“Only from very important coats.”
Barnaby examined the notice. “A replacement teaching charter may be petitioned for before the sale.”
“May,” Mara agreed. “You’ll need a sponsor and evidence of useful instruction. There’s a hearing office on the central island.”
“I’ve taught a kettle to stop boiling.”
“Good. Teach the hearing office.”
She shifted her case to her other hand. Felix noticed that the leather strap had cut a red line across her wrist.
“Tea?” he offered.
Mara glanced at the stove, then at the long bridge.
“I have nine more notices.”
“You can be sorry about those after a cup.”
She considered this and came inside.
While she drank, Felix studied the page. An empty cottage could apparently owe money, expire professionally, and be sold out from under a man who had successfully avoided breakfast dishes for three days.
Earth had taught him to fear forms. He had hoped a world with floating mountains would be less committed to them.
“Has anyone come to look at it?” he asked.
“Not through my office.”
“That wasn’t quite no.”
Mara looked toward the window. “A surveyor asked which paths went below your island. He had a private badge. I couldn’t tell whose.”
“There’s a district underneath?”
“You haven’t been down?”
“I’ve been learning to breathe without injuring myself. It keeps a person close to home.”
She set her cup down. “Three terraces, then the valley road. Kitchens, workshops, houses. My sister lives by the lower stairs.”
Felix looked through the window at the garden fence. Beyond it, cloud drifted across the edge of the island. He had thought of the space below as scenery.
He disliked learning it had an address.
When Mara finished, he walked her to the bridge. Barnaby flew ahead, muttering about dormant properties with functioning residents.
Solitude Spire was smaller than the other academy islands. Its cottage stood near the center, sheltered by a crooked pine. To the south, garden terraces fell toward the clouds. The stone bridge left the eastern edge and reached the western landing in a shallow curve, with a timber section where old stone had been replaced.
One of those timbers groaned beneath Mara’s boot.
She stopped.
“That new?”
“The noise or the wood?”
“Either answer worries me.”
Felix crouched beside the rail. A crack ran through the stone footing below it. Rain had washed pale dust into the joint. A copper strip embedded along the bridge glimmered, dimmed, and glimmered again.
He touched the stone. It trembled beneath his fingertips, too slightly to feel unless he was still.
“Barnaby?”
The owl landed on a post.
“The bridge is overdue for inspection.”
“How overdue?”
“That depends on whether the inspection six years ago was an inspection or merely an argument held near a bridge.”
Mara took two careful steps back toward the cottage.
“I’ll wait for the inspector, then. His name was on my route this morning.”
Felix looked across to the academy landing. Students in bright robes crossed a distant courtyard. A bell rang. Someone laughed. Ordinary things, close enough to see and far enough away to make his narrow bridge feel suddenly inconvenient.
His deck warmed in his pocket.
He took it out. The little star spun more quickly here. A thin line extended from its center toward a symbol he hadn’t seen before.
Local anchor detected.
He turned the deck. The line pointed beneath his feet.
“Is there something under the bridge?”
“An old formation,” Barnaby said. “Do not poke it.”
“That wasn’t my first plan.”
“I have observed your second plans.”
Felix put the deck away. He would ask Tamsin about the footing. Then the charter. Then perhaps the roof. The shutter could continue expressing itself for another day.
Across the bridge, a young woman stumbled onto the western landing.
She caught the rail with one hand and stayed upright through what looked like pure dislike of falling. Silver hair had come loose from a dark braid. Her left sleeve was wet with blood. A narrow sword hung at her hip, and a leather satchel was strapped tight across her chest.
She looked behind her.
Three men were coming through the courtyard gate. Their gray coats bore the same white tree stitched on her collar.
The woman stepped onto the bridge.
“Wait,” Felix called. “That isn’t safe.”
She looked down at the gap beneath the rail, then back at the men.
“Neither is this side.”
She started across.
Barnaby spread his brass wings. Mara moved behind the stone post.
Felix held the warm deck in one hand and the auction notice in the other.
The kettle had saved him eleven minutes.
He was beginning to suspect the morning had noticed.