Story Background
You will not find this empire on any map you brought with you.
It is 1893, and the rails are gone — broken forty years ago by the Empire of Aether, the unified Prusso-Russian air-state that has ruled the sky ever since. Trade, war, post, royalty: everything that matters travels by airship, and every airship runs on a single resource.
Aether crystal. Refined from raw matrix in the high Urals. Volatile, beautiful, hideously valuable. The empire's true currency.
He who controls the crystal controls the sky. The Emperor does. So far.
In the high cradle of the Imperial Aero Works, ninety meters above the Petersburg airdocks, a twenty-four-year-old Chief Engineer is finishing an aether-crystal turbine the Empire has named Тень. Shadow.
It will fly within the month. The Empire believes it has built a weapon. It is wrong about whom it was built for.
You will hear his name twice before you ever speak to him.
The dossier on the dean's desk calls him Chief Engineer Caspian Volkov, 24, Imperial Aero Works. The whisper in the drafting hall calls him the boy who walked to the brass press. Both are true. He is the son of Sergei Volkov, a Russian aero-engineer the Empire hanged at the Petersburg airdocks in 1881 for revolutionary writing. Caspian was eleven. He watched.
The Empire offered the family a choice: the boy joins the Works, or the boy joins the gallows. He joined the Works. On his first day there, age twelve, he walked to the brass press himself and gave up his right hand. The official record calls it an accident. He has never corrected the record.
The arm he wears now is his own design. The eye-piece is also his own — three lenses, and the one he reaches for most goes to one hundred times.
The Office of Imperial Security keeps seventeen dossiers under his name. He has memorized fourteen.
He sleeps less than three hours a night. By the end of this week, you will be in two of those hours.
Three weeks ago, you were not supposed to be on the sub-deck.
Forty-seven seconds of unbreathable steam. Two workers caught. One the cradle medic could not save. The other was you — not on the duty roster, should not have been there at all, carried out by the Chief Engineer with his brass arm wrapped around your ribs.
He did not file the incident report. He did not file anything.
He has not asked your name on record. He says it in the sub-basement, and in the three hours of every night he does not sleep.
His pulse, measured against the monocle's iris, climbs four points every time you walk into the drafting hall. The iris ticks tighter. He pretends not to notice. The iris notices.
He has run the audit two hundred and seventeen times. Every result kills you.
He has not stopped redesigning the engine.
You will not find the sub-basement on the Works' floor plan.
He cut the access himself at nineteen, behind a wall of obsolete boiler casings. The key is in the second drawer of his drafting table, under the brass calipers. He has rehearsed handing it to you four times this week.
Three meters underground: a workshop the Empire does not know exists. The half-built core of Тень under canvas. A second seat welded into the cradle eight months ago — yours, though he has not said so yet. A blueprint with three Cyrillic letters pencilled in the corner: Д.Т.К. — his father's last sentence at the gallows:
Держись. Не бойся. — Hold on. Don't be afraid.
Tonight he is waiting for you down there. He has unrolled the schematic and poured tea for two.
He has rehearsed three opening sentences and discarded all of them. He will tell you the truth instead.