'I'm sure there are stairs.' The exalted stepped backward again. 'Let's go find them. We need to figure out where the punch cards are fed into the Engine.'
'It'll be faster to go straight down.' Taya gauged the distance and began unhooking her safety line. 'It'll be just like the hop you took to get up to the balcony, but easier. The next catwalk is only twenty, thirty feet below us.'
Cristof closed his eyes and sighed.
'I don't like sounding like a coward, Taya. And there really aren't many things in the world that scare me. But I don't like heights, and I would prefer to avoid them as much as possible.' He sounded pained.
'It's all right.' Taya gave him a sympathetic look. 'I don't think you're a coward, not after forcing yourself into a first flight. I've got a phobia, too — I don't like crowds. If I'm stuck in a real shoulder-to-shoulder press, I get faint. Cassi has to drag me down to the Markets each winter to do my Ladysday shopping.'
He opened his eyes, looking down at her.
'I don't like crowds, either,' he said.
'This won't be so bad. I'll hook our two safety lines together. We'll drape the lines over this railing and use them to guide our descent. Remember, with all the ondium you're wearing, you're going to float even if you lose your grip on the ropes. We'll climb to the next catwalk, I'll shake the lines loose while you hunt for the punch card whatchamacallit, and if it's not there, we'll do it again.'
'Tray. The punch cards are fed into a tray.'
'Does it look like the one on the University engine?'
'I don't know.' He sighed, his apprehension obvious. Taya tentatively reached out to pat his shoulder, trying to reassure him.
It was strange. Alister had made her feel warm and admired, but he'd never made her feel needed. He'd paid her plenty of compliments, but she'd never felt like she offered him anything he couldn't get from someone else.
Cristof, on the other hand, had never tried to impress her and had never hesitated to acknowledge that she could do things he couldn't. He just stepped aside and let her work.
Taya liked the fact that he didn't try to make himself seem perfect. He was defensive and sarcastic and not very handsome, but he trusted her, and that made a big difference.
Still, I'd better fly carefully,
she thought, studying his sharp face.
We're both negotiating a lot of obstruction currents right now.
'The tray must be connected directly to the Engine,' he said after a minute, looking down through the grillwork under their feet. 'I'll bet there's at least one level where a catwalk extends out to the machine itself. That'll be where the technicians feed in the program.'
'Then we'll keep descending, level by level, until we see it,' Taya said, lifting her hand. 'Let's hope it's not on the other side of the mountain, though.'
Cristof turned and contemplated the machinery-filled abyss.
'Obviously,' he said, after a moment, 'flying is the most efficient solution.' He paused, and she saw him brace himself. 'How long do you think it would take to make a circuit of the entire Engine?'
'I can't even begin to guess.' She leaned over the railing again, scanning the horizon. 'I'd have to spiral. Fifteen minutes? Twenty? It depends on how close the catwalk is, and what the air currents are like.'
'Can you guide me down again?'
'Here?' She straightened, surprised that he'd suggest it. 'No. Rappelling is one thing, but flying in a completely new airspace, next to so many parts and cables — I'd need to pay attention to what I was doing. Guiding you would distract me too much. I'll tell you what. I'll take the first flight down by myself, and when I find the tray, I'll come back to tell you. Then we can decide how to get there.'
'I have no intention of letting you go down there alone. There could be a killer in here.'
'If I see anyone, I'll head back up.'
'Investigation is my job, not yours.'
'And while we stand here arguing about it, someone could be running Clockwork Heart through the Great Engine.'
Cristof's jaw tightened. Then he jerked one shoulder, turning away.
'All right.' He pinched the bridge of his nose, under his glasses. 'Be careful.'
Taya nodded and climbed on top of the wrought-iron catwalk railing. The metal trembled from side to side beneath her boots and she swayed. Cristof stepped forward, steadying her, his eyes averted from the chasm as he grabbed her harness and held her in place. Taya slipped her arms into her wings and unlocked them. The exalted ducked as a wing swept over his head.
'Sorry.'
His fingers tightened for a moment on her harness straps.
'Let go,' she ordered. He released her and jumped backward as she kicked off from the railing.
Taya let herself drop until she was well under the first catwalk, then spread her wings and flapped hard, tilting to keep her body parallel to the inner curve of the mountainside.
The air was warm and filled with unpredictable thermals and currents caused by the steam engines and incandescent lights, spinning drums and coiling springs, thumping pistons and clicking levers. The Engine's constant movement at the edge of her vision kept drawing her attention away from the air currents until she bobbled and her awareness snapped back to maintaining her balance.
Taya concentrated. She was used to flying through cables and towers — that was a given, in the closely developed cityscape of Ondinium — but usually the only movement around her was the slow coast of a wireferry, the quick dart of a bird, or the lazy glide of another icarus. Flying next to the Engine required a very different set of skills.
She was glad she hadn't brought Cristof with her.
Thinking of him, she swept in a circle in the empty space between the catwalked mountain wall and the moving immensity of the Engine and looked up.
He was leaning over the catwalk, his wings glinting over his back as he watched her.
He looked down
, she thought, pleased, and tilted her wings in salute before starting a slow, spiraling descent around the Engine. He didn't wave back. He probably had a death grip on the iron railing.
She flew around the Great Engine of Ondinium, marveling again at its complexity. She'd learned in school that it had taken fifty years to build, and engineers had been tinkering with it ever since, expanding, adapting, and experimenting. As the Engine had grown, so had the chamber in which it was housed. Whenever one of the mountain's ondium mines had been tapped out, the tunnels had been destroyed, their leavings cast into new gears and their stone hauled away to build the houses, mansions, bridges and statues that had turned the surface of Ondinium Mountain into the most densely populated city in the world.
The air shuddered with the Engine's heat and vibrations, and air currents danced and broke against each other as gears turned and pistons pumped. Cables suspended by ondium counterweights criss-crossed the empty space around the vast Engine, carrying power and oil and she couldn't guess what else. Every few levels she saw steam engines built on top of massive platforms, chugging away to power the bright lights and giant machine. Some of the catwalks were lined with the same kind of huge iron cylinders she saw spinning in the machine, wrapped in blankets and strapped to the walls with thick cables.
No wonder they call it the heart of Ondinium
, she thought, soaring across the miles of space that surrounded it. Her own heart seemed to pump in time to pounding beat, and her wingtips trembled whenever she flew too close to one of its oversized mechanisms.
