Bram Möller's Arc

Chapter 54 of 63

An hour past the stamped harbor, the air changed. Bram felt it in the vent line first, a hard bite through his glove. He checked the thermometer clipped to the console. The needle had dropped twelve degrees since the last reading. He looked west. The sky ahead was pale and flat, the kind of pale that meant a cold snap was settling in over the ridge. "We fly into that with the bag as it is, the patch panels crack," Bram said. The salvaged crown seam was the weakest part of the envelope. Cold that hard would stiffen the fabric, and the first hard gust would open it like paper. Omondi bent over the console, glasses fogging. He wiped them on his coat and squinted at the gauge. "Two hours to the next harbor. We will not make it warm." He fumbled the pencil and caught it against his knee. "We need to heat the fabric before we enter the front. Not during." Cora pulled her mechanical owl from its perch. She unclipped the wing panel and showed Bram the small brass coil inside. "I stripped a spare heater out of the depot kit. It fits the vent collar. If we run the orchid backward for ten minutes and pipe the steam through the coil, we warm the seam from the inside." Bram shook his head. "Reversing the vent damaged the last envelope. I will not do that to this one." "Not the full reverse," Cora said. "A quarter turn. Warm air, not hot. I ran the numbers twice." He looked at her. Fifteen years old, grease on her wrist, steady eyes. She had been right about the anchor pin. She had been right about the traverse. "Show me the numbers." She pulled his worn journal from the console pocket and opened it to a blank page. She drew the vent, the coil, the collar. She marked the pressure limit at the crown seam and stopped a full mark below it. Omondi checked the math, nodded once, and dropped the pencil again. Bram sent the compass hawk ahead to log the front's edge. It came back inside twenty minutes with a strip of sleet frozen to its leg feathers. The front was closer than the pale sky had shown. "Now," Bram said. Cora fitted the coil to the collar. Bram eased the orchid a quarter turn back. Warm steam moved through the fabric above them. He watched the crown seam. It stayed slack. It did not stiffen. After ten minutes he closed the vent and turned the orchid forward again. They crossed into the cold ten minutes later. The bag held. The seam held. Bram let out a breath he had been keeping in his teeth. Omondi checked the thermometer. "We bought the crossing. But the coil is spent. One use only." Bram wrote it in the journal. One warming used. The next front would find them cold.