Day 7 of 30.
The boiler room was hell, or as close to it as a basement in the Lantern Quarter could get.
Steam filled it wall to wall, so thick he could see only the red glow of the runes and the lantern in the corner, and the air was so hot it burned the inside of his nose with every breath. The old furnace was shaking on its iron feet as if it wanted to walk out of the room. Its runes glowed red and angry, and the pipes above it screamed, one long rising note, like a kettle the size of a house.
Old Qian was on his knees beside the feed pipe with a lantern, peering at the joints with his face so close to the iron that his eyebrows must have been singeing.
"Get out, boy!" he shouted, without looking up. "This is no place for a liar with one arm!"
"I closed the valve," Lin Yan shouted back. "I'm staying."
For a moment the thin old face in the lantern light gave nothing away at all.
Then Qian pointed.
"There. The old cistern. Behind the east wall. Dry for thirty years. A road home, if we can open it."
Lin Yan looked. Low on the wall, half hidden under rust and moss and a cobweb with a dead spider still in it, was a round iron plate as big as a cartwheel.
"The surge has to go into the cistern," Qian said. "One surge. The big one, when the pressure peaks. If it goes anywhere else, it goes into the furnace, and the furnace goes into the street, and the street goes into the sky."
"The Returning Nail."
"The Returning Nail," Qian said. "I'll throw it. You carry it."
"You're better."
"I'm seventy." Qian held up his right hand, and it was trembling, and it had been trembling the whole time, Lin Yan realised, he had only been too busy to see it. "My hands shake worse than yours. I can throw. I can listen. I can no longer carry a surge through my body; I tried, ten years ago, and it went through my chest instead, and I don't recommend it. That is your job." He looked at the left arm. "The road goes through your left palm. If it's too much, it goes through your arm."
Lin Yan swallowed, and his throat was so dry the swallow clicked.
"Okay," he said.
---
Mei came down the stairs two at a time with Lin Xiao behind her, both of them wet and red from the steam.
Mei took one look at the iron plate, the rust, and the crack running through the joint where the cistern pipe met the wall, and her face went flat and professional.
"The contact is broken," she said. "The rust has eaten it. The surge will jump."
"Can you fix it?"
She was already unrolling her paper, which turned out to be mostly blank, and pulling out a brush and a small pot of copper ink, and she painted a rune straight onto the iron over the crack in one long stroke without stopping to think. The ink hissed as it touched the hot metal. The rune glowed green, then gold, and sealed over the crack like a bandage.
"That will hold for one surge," she said. "Maybe two. After that it burns off. Don't ask me for a third."
"One is all I need."
Lin Xiao pushed past them both. "The houses are clear. Everyone on Lotus Lane is out. Auntie Wang is counting heads in the square, she's counted them four times, she keeps getting one extra." She looked at Lin Yan, then down at his arm, and the red went out of her face. "Ge. No."
"Xiao."
"You can't even lift a teapot with that arm! I watched you try this morning! You used both hands and you spilled it!"
"I closed the valve," Lin Yan said. "I asked the wrong question. So I have to answer it."
She stared at him, and he watched her decide. He saw it on her face, the same thing he had seen on the first morning with the cabbages: the moment when she stopped arguing with the world and started working out what to do about it.
"Then I'll count for you," she said.
---
Qian pulled the dark copper nail out of his hair.
He threw it. It struck the centre of Mei's glowing rune with a small clean tok, and the copper thread ran back to his hand, and he held the thread out to Lin Yan without a word.
"Three paces," Qian said.
Lin Yan stepped back until he was three paces from the wall, counting them, and then counted them again because he did not trust the first count.
"Both heels on the same structure."
The boiler room floor was one huge iron plate, bolted to the furnace's feet and to the wall together. He planted both heels on it and felt the furnace shaking up through the metal into his bones.
"Left palm on the thread before the third pulse. When the pressure peaks, you send it home."
He held the thread in his right hand and raised his left palm above it. The arm was shaking so badly that his fingers were jumping on their own, like someone else's fingers playing an instrument he could not hear.
The furnace groaned. The pipes shrieked. The pressure needle on the old brass dial was climbing into the red, and the glass over the dial had a crack in it that he had not noticed before and now could not stop noticing.
"Threefive," he said through his teeth. "When does it peak?"
"Counting," Threefive said. Its voice was steady, and for once there was no certainly in it anywhere. "The needle is rising one mark every four breaths. It will peak in about twenty breaths. I will tell you."
"Lin Xiao."
"I'm counting too," Lin Xiao said. "I'm counting the needle. It's faster than the jade says. A little."
Mei stood by the iron plate with her brush ready. Qian knelt by the furnace with his ear flat against the pipe, eyes shut, like a man listening for a train through the rail.
Upstairs, very far away, Lin Yan could hear Madam Luo praying to her dragons, all nine of them, by name.
He touched the thread with his right hand and listened.
Tok.
Tok.
Tok.
Three pulses. There was a road.
"Twelve breaths," Threefive said.
His heart was going so hard he could hear it over the furnace, or thought he could.
"Eight."
His left arm had gone numb from the elbow down, and he looked at it to make sure it was still where he had left it.
"Five."
"Four," said Lin Xiao, half a breath early.
"Three."
The furnace screamed.
"NOW!" Threefive and Lin Xiao shouted together.
Tok.
Tok.
Lin Yan slammed his left palm down on the copper thread.
---
It felt like grabbing a live wire with his whole body.
Something enormous came up through the floor, through his heels and his legs and into his chest, hot and heavy and furious, a thing that wanted to go everywhere at once and had been told no for too long.
Home, he thought, desperately. Go home. The road is there. Go home.
He pushed.
The surge went down his left arm like fire poured into a pipe, and every inch of the arm was burning, and he heard someone screaming from far away and only understood afterward that it was him.
Then, suddenly, it found the road.
It poured out of his palm, along the thread, into the nail, through Mei's rune and into the dark empty cistern behind the wall with a sound like a giant bell struck once in a mountain.
BOOOONG.
The whole bathhouse shook, and dust came down from every beam, and in the pools upstairs the water jumped.
Then it was quiet.
---
Lin Yan was lying on his back on the iron floor.
He had no memory of falling. The ceiling was swimming in slow circles. Somebody was holding his head in her lap, and it was Lin Xiao, and she was crying and hitting his shoulder at the same time, the good shoulder, which was something.
"Idiot! Idiot! Idiot!"
"Did it work?" he croaked.
"The needle's back to green," Qian said, from somewhere above him, and the old man's voice sounded strange, thick. "The furnace is breathing. The cistern took the whole surge."
Mei was crouching by the wall. The gold rune had burned off, and the iron underneath was cracked in a star pattern round the copper nail, a perfect star, as if somebody had drawn it.
"One surge," she said. She looked back at him over her shoulder. "You carried the whole thing."
He tried to lift his left arm and could see it, which was a start. Red, blistered from wrist to elbow, with a thin burned line running down the middle like a road on a map.
It felt like a piece of wood somebody had tied to his shoulder.
"Qian Ye," he said. "Is my arm still there?"
"Your arm is still there," Qian said. "It will hurt for a week. Then it will be stronger. You were three paces. Both heels. Palm before the third pulse. For a first time..."
He stopped, and coughed, and did not finish the sentence.
"Good," he said roughly, and turned away and found something on the furnace that needed his attention very badly.
---
Later, much later, when the steam had gone and the Lantern Quarter had gone back into its houses grumbling, Lin Yan sat on the bathhouse steps with his arm wrapped in Auntie Aru's balm and about four times as many bandages as it needed, because Auntie Aru had been upset.
Lin Xiao's bronze disc chimed. She looked at it, and then held it out to him without saying anything.
It was a post on the skyboard, from Open Heaven's champion.
> @astra · 11:40
>
> the reroute into the old cistern at the nine dragons was lin yan's idea.
> good idea.
That was all. Two lines.
He read it again, and again, and a fourth time, the way he used to read the result PDF, looking for the catch.
He had failed four exams. He had closed the wrong valve. He had lied to an old man and nearly boiled four streets and a cat.
And a man who could hold ten streets in one hand had just told the whole sky that he had a good idea.
He sat there on the steps and stared at those two lines, holding the disc in his one good hand as if it might break if he breathed on it.
Then he thought about the boiler room. About an old man on his knees in the steam, pointing at a rusted iron plate on the wall. There. The old cistern.
He opened the Sleeper's account with his thumb, slowly, and wrote a reply.
> @sleeper_35
>
> the cistern was qian ye's idea. i only carried it.
Astra answered almost at once.
> @astra
>
> noted. it was a good carry.
Lin Xiao was reading over his shoulder. She nudged Old Qian, who was sitting two steps down with his pipe unlit in his mouth, and pointed at the disc.
Qian looked. He grunted, and turned his face away fast, and stayed turned away, looking at a wall that had nothing on it.