his fallen master. ‘Get ready to pull him out.’
‘You’re not going to do what I think you…?’
Hannah inserted the punch card. ‘What do you care? You’re going to die anyway if this doesn’t work.’
The drums in the transaction engine on the wall began to rotate as her punch card instructions were received and processed. Please, let there still be enough steam left in its reservoir to do the job.
Rudge was tearing the sleeve off his body suit, wrapping the material around his eyes. ‘Cover your face, grub.’
Hannah ripped a line of cotton material off her own body suit, bundling the makeshift sweat-soaked bandanna around her eyes.
The tolerances. It was all down to the tolerances now. Her best guess at the weight of the suit and the intense pressure of the steam tap below the gate, and…
The blast came like a lightning bolt cast from the gates of the hell they denied.
…how wide the opening of a single vane would have to be to shift the suit, and…
Hannah was thrown back into the wall, blind behind her bandanna, deafened by the crash of the displaced suit.
…how long to leave it open without cooking the three of them…
Hannah yelled as she realized she had fallen forward onto the oven-hot pressure gate, the thick iron burning into her hands as she pushed herself up and tore off her blindfold. It was like being inside a surface mist, now, but she could see that T-face was dragging Rudge away – his fallen suit shifted over to the other side of the shaft by the force of the volcano of steam Hannah had briefly allowed through that single open vane.
Some piece of gear on Rudge’s suit had smacked him when it had shifted, though. Rudge was bleeding from the head and unconscious. Hannah climbed back up to the transaction-engine platform, closely followed by T-face bearing the weight of his master’s body, and she was about to reach for the single dangling rappel line attached to her suit, when she realized that it had vanished. Oh, sweet Circle. It was on the metal gate below her – her line must have become dislodged when she steam-blasted Rudge’s suit away from his broken body. Hannah’s suit was still lodged far above them, though. Far enough that there was no way she was going to be able to climb up the shaft’s smooth walls to reach it. T-face was shifting from foot to foot, moaning as he took in their hopeless predicament. Hannah fought down the sense of mounting panic. How to get out? She couldn’t signal the turbine workers with the transaction engine to call for help. That was the whole point of it. An independent steam-driven node with only one purpose, controlling the gate. Could she open the pressure gate again, blast herself, Rudge and the ab-lock up to her suit, using Rudge’s suit as a lifting platform? No, that was suicide. Just a second with a single vane being opened had nearly killed them both. She might reach her suit, but it would be without her skin.
‘Damn you!’ Hannah yelled up the shaft. ‘Damn you for sending me down here to die.’ Was that for Vardan Flail? For the master of the turbine halls? For everyone on Jago who needed the dark energy that was going to end up killing her? It hardly mattered anymore. Rudge was starting to wake, but not to full sensibility, drifting in and out of a shivering half-awareness. He was muttering something, and Hannah bent down to hear him better.
‘Winch.’
She looked up at her suit, its flickering lantern signalling teasingly to her. There was a winch hook on the right leg of the suit. It was designed for dragging broken turbines out of the way on the floor of the halls above, but if she could get it to lower itself down, then they could shimmy up the line. The winch’s activation lever was up there too. Thirty feet above her head, but it might as well have been in the clouds for all that she could reach it. Unless…Leaping down onto the burning hot gate, Hannah retrieved Rudge’s tool kit and brought it back to her ledge. She rifled through the contents of until she found it, a lone signal flare.
‘One shot,’ mumbled Rudge.
One shot. She had better make it a good one. Hannah pointed the red tube up at the winch lever, aiming it as well as she could without a sight, and pressed down on the trigger,