There was no sensation of falling.
The moment Silas’s boots left the quartz rim, the crushing pull of gravity simply evaporated, replaced by an intoxicating, weightless surge that threw his stomach into his throat. The violet light enveloped them in a soundless hurricane, pulling them upward through the hollow bronze flue at a speed that made his teeth rattle.
Below them, Sector Zero shrank into a postage stamp of glowing geometry, then disappeared entirely into the darkness.
They rocketed through the vertical anatomy of Oakhaven.
Because the central conduit was slotted with hundreds of narrow observation grilles, Silas caught fractured, strobe-like glimpses of the city’s stratified society as they soared upward.
At one thousand feet, they blasted past the Low Quarters.
Through the brass grates, Silas saw the great foundry floors where he had spent his youth. Everything was frozen in amber stillness: a spill of molten iron from Crucible Four hung suspended in the air like a fiery, curving ribbon of liquid gold; a soot-covered foundryman stood frozen in mid-swing, his sledgehammer suspended above an iron rivet; in an alleyway off Gantry Six, a scrawny boy—Toby—was caught in the act of ducking beneath a coal wagon, his dirty face turned up toward the vents in silent bewilderment.
Hold on, Toby, Silas thought, his throat tightening. Just hold on a little longer.
At two thousand five hundred feet, they pierced the Great Divide—the two-hundred-foot-thick slab of reinforced granite that separated the working class from the patrician heights.
The air grew perceptibly thinner, colder, and sweeter. The smell of sulfur and scorched tallow vanished, replaced by the perfume of night-blooming jasmine, crushed lavender, and the faint, citrus tang of ozone generators.
They burst into the Mid-Terraces.
Here, the architecture shifted radically. The blackened brick and utilitarian iron gave way to sweeping arches of white Carrara marble, inlaid with brass filigree that traced constellations and astrological charts. Grand promenades were lined with glass-domed conservatories where exotic, blue-leafed trees grew under artificial sun-lamps.
People were frozen here, too, but they were creatures from a different world. Aristocrats in voluminous velvet gowns and embroidered frock coats stood frozen along the balustrades, crystal glasses of amber wine tilted toward their lips, mechanical songbirds frozen with their golden beaks open mid-trill. None of them had any idea that five thousand feet beneath their silk slippers, the foundation of their luxurious cage was about to fracture into ash.
"Silas!" Vesper’s voice crackled through his ears, distorted by the temporal static. "The draft is losing velocity! The Core's reserve is burning out!"
Silas looked up.
The violet hurricane around them was beginning to flicker, its edges turning from smooth, luminous indigo to jagged, sputtering sparks of pale gray. Their upward momentum was dying. They were passing four thousand feet, entering the private precincts of the High Spire itself, but the vertical chimney was coming to an end.
Above them, fifty yards away, the hollow flue terminated in a massive, circular iron iris valve—the sealed floor of the Chancellor’s inner sanctum.
"The iris is closed!" Silas shouted, his boots kicking against empty air as gravity began to claw its way back into his limbs. His stomach plummeted; their ascent was slowing to a crawl. In another five seconds, they would stall, hang suspended in the shaft, and fall four thousand feet back to the mercury floor of Sector Zero.
"Silas! Your grapnel!" Vesper cried, pointing to his satchel.
Silas didn't hesitate. He tore the pneumatic grapnel gun from his bag. The brass air cylinder was cold against his palm, its pressure needle hovering just above the red line.
He aimed the three-pronged steel hook straight up at the center of the closed iron iris, compensating for the residual spin of the draft.
Thwump!
The grapnel shot upward, trailing a thin, braided cable of high-tensile steel. The barbed prongs struck the central hub of the iris, skidded with a shower of orange sparks across the plate, and bit deep into the bronze emergency relief ring.
Snap!
The cable went taut just as their upward momentum died completely.
The sudden jerk violently wrenched Silas’s dislocated left shoulder. A scream of blinding, white-hot agony tore through his throat as the combined weight of both bodies snapped the cable tight. His vision blacked out for two terrifying heartbeats; he hung suspended over the four-thousand-foot drop, his right hand clamped around the gun’s firing grip with a death grip, his boots swinging over the abyss.
"I've got you!" Vesper yelled, scrambling up his body like a cat, her hands locking around the steel cable above his head. She pulled a locking carabiner from her belt and snapped it around his harness, taking the weight off his torn shoulder.
Silas sagged against the cable, panting heavily, sweat pouring down his face and stinging his eyes. "Tell me... you have a key for the trapdoor."
"I have something better," she said, looking up at the center of the iris valve.
She reached into her coat and pulled out a small, hexagonal brass cylinder—an emergency release spindle used by the Spire's maintenance engineers. She jammed the tool into the manual trip lever at the center of the valve, braced both feet against the iron petals, and threw her entire body weight against the lever.
Clack-clack-clack-hiss!
The pneumatic seals of the upper floor released with a deafening blast of warm, dry air. The six curved iron leaves of the iris valve slid back like the petals of a metallic flower, opening an aperture into a room floored with mirror-polished ebony and lit by the cold, pale light of the open sky.
With a final, desperate heave, Vesper hauled Silas up through the aperture, rolling him onto the polished ebony floor just as the grapnel cable below snapped under the strain, whistling down into the dark abyss.
The iris valve snapped shut behind them with a heavy, final thud.
Silas lay on his back, staring up at something he had not seen since he was four years old: the sky.
It was not the sulfuric, yellow haze of the foundries. It was a vast, terrifying dome of midnight blue, dusted with ten thousand diamond-sharp stars that glittered in the crisp, freezing air. A massive crescent moon hung low on the horizon, illuminating a sea of white, jagged mountain peaks that stretched out into the infinite wasteland below.
"Welcome to the summit, apprentice," a dry, cultured voice remarked from across the room.
Silas rolled over, his hand dropping to his belt for a weapon he had already lost.
Standing before a massive, three-story-tall loom of gold and quartz glass was a man in an immaculate white velvet robe trimmed with ermine. He was slender, his silver hair neatly combed back from high, aristocratic cheekbones, his pale hands resting atop an ornate walking stick tipped with an uncut aether diamond.
Chancellor Sterling did not look surprised to see two bleeding, grease-stained fugitives crawl out of his floorboards.
He looked, if anything, mildly annoyed that they had scuffed his varnish.