Page 61 of The Sunlit Man

He looked to the other two for explanation.

“Call to gather,” Zeal said, reading the horns, which were bleating out a pattern. “The people have been warned already to gatheressential clothing and items in one bag each and leave the rest. This is the final warning. We’re going to start dumping the other ships to conserve power.”

“Already?” Nomad said. “Your people move quickly.”

As soon as he said it, he knew he’d opened himself up for—

Gosh, you think? The knight gives a pointed roll of his eyes—the ones he’d totally have if Nomad hadn’t killed him. They move fast? Really? The people who spend their lives outracing the sun, always one step from being vaporized in a wave of burning light? They move fast?

Well, damn. Who would have thought?

“You really don’t think that’s sarcasm?” Nomad said in Alethi.

It’s just being extra clear.

“I think maybe you go a little far.”

Well, you don’t have a valet who likes to stab himself with bits of unknown power sources for fun. You’ve got to be very deliberate with that sort of person, you know.

Nomad grunted, sliding his notebook into his coat pocket. “Come on,” he said to Rebeke. “I want to check on the engineers and watch their new version explode.”

It turned outthat Beacon’s little engineering team was packed with overachievers. They hadn’t made one new prototype, but three, each using parts of his design to modify a small engine.

Only two of these exploded. The third went soaring up into the air, visible only by its blinking light in the darkness—which let some people on a quadcycle with nets zip out and catch it once it fell.

The ascent left the crowd in awe. Most of the people of Beacon had gathered here to watch as they were being evacuated from their homes to the larger central ships.

“It ascended so high,” one of them said. “Far past where a ship can normally go…”

“This might work,” another said. “It actuallymight work!”

You are so lucky, the hero says, that one of them flew.

“Agreed,” Nomad whispered. If all three of those tests had exploded, he might be facing a riot.

The engineers gathered around him as the engine was retrieved. They looked up at him like children, anticipating praise. Storms, he always felt awkward in this sort of situation. Still, he’d been trained in the right words to say. “Excellent job. You just saved this city.” He nodded toward the engine. “Flew higher and faster than you thought, eh?”

“It was supposed to hover,” Solemnity Divine said. “That’s what your design said, at least. It’s workingtoowell, rocketing into the sky. We’ll do another design run on that. But there’s one other thing I wanted to talk to you about.”

She pointed to several large ships near the center of the city, each dominated by a cylindrical structure three stories high. The water towers. They were like the enclosure for the Chorus, but more industrial. People were being moved into the other ships that had been chosen for the ascent, including the central hub. But not these three.

“Those should contain just enough to get us up the mountains and then let us control our descent,” she said. “We’ll put them at the edges of the city, uninhabited, and let you be ready to drop those entire ships off once they are empty. But we were hoping for some help on how to insulate and heat them. Against the cold, you know? We’ll crash quickly if our propellant freezes once we get past atmosphere.”

“You don’t know a lot about space or vacuums, do you?” he guessed.

“Uh, shades, no,” she said. “Why would we?”

“You don’t need to insulate against the cold,” he said. “Thoughdo install some heat sinks—particularly on the piping near the engines. Weshouldbe fine, as we’ll be dumping heat prodigiously. That’s kind of the point of all this. But I would still worry about those pipes.”

“Heat,” she said flatly. “You’re worried about too much heat? Up that high?”

“Trust me,” he said. “If we enter a true vacuum—which we might not actually do—the only way to lose heat is through ejection of matter or through infrared radiation, which isextremelyslow. There’s no convection. No air to conduct heat away. I suggest some fins, if you have time, exposed as much as you can and ready to radiate heat. But my guess is it won’t be relevant.”

She nodded, taking his word on it, and went off with the others to begin creating new designs. As he stood, watching the people be sorted into the ships, he was surprised to see a break in the clouds above—that was supposedly rare on this side of the sunrise—which let the city pass into the light of the rings again. They illuminated a landscape of jagged and craggy highlands. Rainwater ran down the rugged stone hills in a thousand little waterfalls.

That’s a sight, the knight says with awe. Just water and stones, but on such a scale as to be beautiful. Amazing. Why is it we hate traveling these worlds again?

“Because we’re being hunted?”

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