The Clockwork Rocket

it, no point even acknowledging it now. After a moment, Eusebio stopped searching for anything more.

“Good luck,” he said. He lowered his eyes and walked past her, out of the hall.

Yalda stood watching her new neighbors jostling for access to Frido and his assistants. Out of nowhere, she felt a sudden surge of anger for Daria. With no responsibilities, and so close to retirement, why couldn’t she have come and taught here?

A young solo was standing at the edge of the crowd, one of the recruits who’d witnessed Benedetta’s death. Only two people from that group had chosen to stay with the project.

Yalda walked up to her. “Fatima?”

“Hello,” the girl replied shyly. Though they’d met before, Eusebio’s proclamation of Yalda’s powers had probably rendered her as unapproachable now as the most self-important Councilor.

“What’s your job?” Yalda asked her. “I ought to know, but I’ve forgotten where we assigned you.”

“The medicinal garden. Weeding.” Fatima sounded disappointed, but resigned to her fate.

“But you’ll still have classes. I’ll teach you, if you’re interested.”

“You’ll teach me about light?”

“Yes.”

Fatima hesitated, then added, emboldened, “Everything you know?”

“Of course,” Yalda promised. “How else are you going to end up knowing twice as much as I do? But right now, let’s see if we can find some other people working in the garden with you, then we can all walk down together.”

14

Yalda sat on her bench in the navigators’ post, glancing across the moss-lit room past Frido and Babila to the clock on the wall, waiting for its counterparts to open the feeds and set the depths of the mountain on fire.

The engines that would lift the Peerless off the ground were controlled from three dozen feed chambers that were spread out across the width of the mountain. Within each chamber was a system of clockwork and gyroscopes that regulated the flow of liberator into the sunstone below, taking account of both the overall launch plan and the need to fine-tune the distribution of forces to keep the rocket from tipping or swerving as it ascended. Two machinists watched over each engine feed, ready to perform any simple interventions or repairs, while a network of signaling ropes made it possible to summon assistance from a circle of neighbors, or if necessary from farther afield.

Over the past year, the machinists and the navigators had rehearsed their responses to dozens of possible emergencies. Eusebio and Frido had written the first scripts, and then Yalda and Babila, an engineer from Red Towers, had joined in, until every survivable disaster they could imagine had been prepared for, and the whole team had agreed on the protocols. Well-made clockwork figurines, Yalda had joked, could have done the job in their stead, but then they would have needed a new set of protocols dictating what to do if those figurines jammed.

“Two lapses to ignition,” Frido announced, as if no one else were watching. Basetown would be empty now, and the last train well on its way to Zeugma—though it would not have arrived at its destination before flames began consuming the far end of the track. If someone put their ear to the calmstone rails, they might hear the launch before the vibrations reached them through the looser, heterogeneous rocks below. The Peerless would rise silently above Zeugma’s horizon, bright as Gemma in the eastern sky; the rumble of the ground, the hiss in the air would come later. Standing on the balcony with Lidia and Daria, perhaps Valeria and Valerio would wave to their departing Aunt. Eusebio would still be on the train heading west; Yalda suspected that he would have secured the rear carriage for himself, for the sake of the view.

“One lapse.”

Yalda experienced a sudden, visceral urge to flee—or commit whatever act of violence or supplication it would take to extract herself from danger. But there were no choices now that led back to solid ground, not even for the omnipotent ruler of the Peerless. Frido had let an earlier landmark pass in silence: three lapses before ignition had been the last chance to cancel the launch. Propagating the decree by rope relay all the way to the edge of the mountain might have taken as little as a lapse and a half—if everyone had responded swiftly, without mishap or delay—but in setting the cut-off time they’d erred on the side of safety. For the message to have reached some, but not all, of the feed chambers, leaving the rest to fire on schedule, would have been the worst outcome imaginable.

“Six pauses.”

On this cue Yalda lay back on her bench and strapped herself in place, just as she’d done in the drills. Since Benedetta’s death no one had attempted to reprise and perfect her feat, but two heavily sedated arborines had survived equivalent trips, disgruntled once the drugs wore off but physically intact. Traveling through the void had been shown not to be fatal, in and of itself. And with the riskiest part of the journey—the landing—indefinitely deferred, the odds for the Peerless were not so bad. The only real difference from all the test flights was a matter of scale.

Frido counted, “Three. Two. One.”

Across the mountain, the feeds would be opening now, sending liberator trickling down crevices in the hardstone cladding that protected the fuel. Yalda turned to glance at the clock; only two pauses had passed, and the gray powder had a long way to fall before it reached exposed sunstone. Babila took on the duty of counting the descent: “Five. Six. Seven.”

Yalda braced her tympanum.

“Eight.”

In less than a flicker the wave of compression came hurtling back up through the rock. Through the bench she felt the first insistent tremor from the nearest ignition points, then the pounding of ever more engines reached her until even the most distant were hammering at her body. For one terrified moment she could discern no change in her weight—her skin reported nothing but the bench’s vibrations—then she tried to raise an arm and was rewarded with unambiguous resistance, easily overcome but enough to banish her fears. If the engines had been too weak to lift the mountain, she would not have felt this. No amount of ineffectual flame and fury, no mere buffeting and shaking, could have mimicked the glorious signature of acceleration.

Belatedly, she checked the balance beside her, isolated in a vibration-deadening frame from the jittering floor. The polished hardstone scrood-weight was stretching the spring by close to twice the original amount, putting the thrust within a notch of its intended value. There could be no doubt that the Peerless was rising, climbing ever faster into the sky.

Chilled air flowed through the room; the cooling system was working. Not only had the mountain failed to collapse into smouldering rubble, or squat on the ground building up heat until it set the world on fire, it wasn’t even going to cook its passengers alive.

Yalda’s relief turned to exhilaration. She tried to picture the events below: flame spilling out from the hole the severed mountain had left in the ground, hot gas and burning dust swirling across the plain to engulf the empty buildings of Basetown. If she envied Eusebio anything now, it was the sight of a dazzling white streak of fire splitting the eastern sky, when all she had before her was this trembling red-lit cave. But no matter; she’d write him a note and have it carved in stone to be passed down the ages: You witnessed the launch in all its