The boiler was a problem the way teeth were a problem — ugly, necessary, and constantly threatening to split open at the wrong moment.
Tikk sat on the workshop floor with his back against the cooling rack and his legs extended in front of him, watching the pressure gauge needle settle. The gauge was his third design — the first two had cracked under steam temperature, because copper tuning shims expanded at a rate he hadn't accounted for until they expanded into the gauge housing and shattered the glass. This one had an iron-alloy housing with deliberately oversized tolerances. It was ugly. It worked.
Three hundred and forty meters.
He'd measured it himself. Three times. With the surveying chain Meren had borrowed from the Academy's geography department, because the Mechanist Institute didn't own one and Tikk refused to estimate distance by pacing. Estimation was what people did when they didn't care whether they were right.
