Chapter 96: INTO THE COLD
Aiden came up from the bottom and went straight to the forge.
The smith cleared his bench. Aiden scraped a handful of cold ash across it and started drawing the tunnels, the way he used to chalk his routes on the lane.
A plan in ash. Wipe it with a sleeve and nobody knows it was ever there. I’ve made worse plans with better tools.
A scrape for the sink. A scrape for the side passage. A smear of finger-ash for the cold chamber where the Ice Heart sat on its cradle.
The smith watched. The cat sat on the warm end of the bench and watched the smith.
Cinder lay against the Chamber wall, glowering. She had worked out that she was being planned around and not with.
She was right.
And when you find out why, you’re going to wish you’d stayed dying.
So am I.
He was not ready to tell her yet.
"Five men," he said. "Two on the wrappings, two on the hooks, one with a slate. They work on it."
He set a knuckle beside the ash smear.
"Something that size doesn’t move itself. It’s still half wrapped. They have to get it out, secure it, and put it in place. That takes time."
"Men go up to eat. To piss. To sleep. The man with the slate writes his notes and takes them upstairs. They have to reach a desk."
"You’re looking for the gap," the smith said.
"There’s always a gap. A locked yard is only locked while somebody’s looking at it." Aiden set a chip of slag at the mouth of the cold chamber. "Nobody watches anything a full shift. That’s not how eyes work. Or men."
He tapped the sink.
"I find the hour when there are fewer men down there. I get down there. I push the cold back from the sink. Then I light Cinder’s fire in the sink before they’re back."
It was a clean plan.
He liked it for about as long as it took Miasma to ruin it.
Miasma came down from the rafter and crossed the bench toward him. She had been sleeping up there whenever Aiden returned to the forge, where the warmth kept her comfortable.
She crossed the bench in one quick green blur and stopped on the ash map.
Then she put one foreleg on the smear that marked the cold chamber and lifted it again.
She looked at him. Then at the smear. Then at him again.
"What?"
She did not put her leg down.
Then Aiden saw what she’d noticed.
Of course.
"The cold is not a fire," he said slowly. "There’s no point when it burns lower. I can’t wait for them to leave. The Ice Heart keeps pulling heat whether anyone is standing beside it or not."
He leaned back.
"They’re not keeping it cold. They’re just getting it into place. The Ice Heart does the rest."
Miasma put her leg down.
"You’re right," he told her. "I was wrong. And I’m going to need you to stop looking at me like that. You’re making this harder than it already is."
She did not stop. She cleaned a spine.
That was her not stopping.
The smith almost smiled, which was a terrible sight. "So there’s no gap."
"The cold’s always on. Which means I can’t wait it out. I have to beat it. "
Aiden looked at the ash.
And I can’t break it with a knife, Miasma’s poison, or Nyx’s intangibility. If Cinder could, she would have burned it down when Harken left her inside.
He rubbed his face, stared at the ash for a long time, then understood.
He wished he hadn’t.
I can’t drag a forge a hundred feet under a city. The sink’s own heat is losing to the cold already.
And I have exactly one other furnace.
He turned and looked at Cinder against the wall.
She had stopped glowering.
The ember came up in her flanks, low. She was waiting for him to say it.
"No," he said. "There has to be a way to make enough heat down there without putting you in front of what froze you."
There wasn’t.
He had known it in the sink. He had just refused to accept it.
The plan did not use Cinder as the prize he protected.
The plan used Cinder as the heat he threw at it.
The only plan is to walk her up to what nearly killed her and set her alight.
She stands at the edge of the cold and pushes it back. And while she’s pushing, I feed her the fruit.
The fire she makes during her evolution is bigger than the fire she makes standing still. That’s how we push the cold out of the sink.
Good plan. Love it.
Cinder held his eyes. The ember climbed.
Whatever she saw in him, she wasn’t afraid. She had burned her own den down rather than be carried out of it. She didn’t back away.
Under the hunger, under the grief, under a year of cold, she was already what her line was bred to be.
And her line did not run from cold. It walked into it.
"You’re not even scared," he said.
It came out somewhere between an accusation and a prayer.
"I’m terrified. And you’re..." He paused. "Look at you. You want to. You want to walk down there and face it."
She put her head against his chest, full weight, the ember warm through his shirt as it climbed.
The cat watched them from the warm end of the bench.
It sighed, put its chin on its paws and shut its eyes.
Wake me when you’ve caught up.
"Thank you," Aiden said. "Invaluable."
Nyx watched from the dark of his coat. The darkness eased slightly when Aiden looked down at it.
"You’ll get us in," he told it. "I know. I just wish that once, the place we go to wasn’t worse than the place we left."
Nyx did not disagree.
It rarely disagreed. That was either trust or low expectations, and he had stopped needing to know which.
Aiden turned to Cinder. "Right. We take you down there. Into the dark. Right beside the cold. And I set you alight while it tries to kill you."
He breathed out.
"When you say it like that, it’s almost a plan."
He put his hand flat on her shoulder.
"For the record, I hate it. For the record, I’m doing it anyway."
He had promised himself he would never let Harken put her in that room again. Promises were easier before the world took away every other choice.
Below them, a hundred feet down, five men were still preparing the Ice Heart, taking their time because nobody was rushing them.
Now it had a clock.
Once the Ice Heart was in place, the sink might never be hot enough to evolve Cinder.
He had until they finished.
However long that is. Nobody down there is on my clock.
He looked at the ash map. Then at the wolf. Then he put a thumb through the smear that marked the cold chamber.
Then I’d better get down there before that thing is fully awake.