Iven’s pressure vessel clicked softly as it cooled on the workhouse bench.
He had spent the first part of the afternoon warming a cold test charge from the service boiler’s accessible contact plate. The heat exchanger took warmth from the iron into the vessel’s water; the thermometer on the iron fell, and the boiler keeper adjusted the ordinary fire before agreeing to a second transfer. Afterward Iven had carried the vessel to the enclosed practice ground and put two short jets across a wet target.
The first had cut a clean line through the hanging rag. The second had moved the weighted board behind it farther than his earlier trial, with less waste between opening and closing the flow.
He had liked that.
He still liked it when he returned to the bench and wrote the results. The numbers were useful, but so was the memory of the recoil through his properly braced legs, the white burst exactly where he had intended it. He had once been pleased simply to make something happen. Now he could choose how it happened, and repeat it.
“Your face is doing it again,” Kesh said.
“What?”
“The face.”
