The cicadas were even louder in Daivad’s house—no doors or window shutters to dampen the sound, just fabric coverings to keep the things from invading the house. And a few still made their way in.

Daivad gave Pait one of his bedrolls (that smelled faintly of old sweat) since she’d chucked the one she’d been given earlier, pointed to the one single real door in his entire house and told her not to touch it, and then took her to a spare room that seemed like it was currently being used for storage—wooden chests were stacked against one wall, and a few smaller piles of various objects had been set against another wall. Then, he left her to settle herself on the bare patch of floor. She should have felt even more miserable here than she had been at Tash’s house.

But … after a while she managed to get a few hours of sleep.

She woke to the unmistakable smell of bacon frying, and her stomach was dragging her out of the room before she was even properly conscious. Bacon.

Their (silent, save for the sizzling of bacon and the sound of chewing) breakfast was interrupted when Daivad suddenly went still in front of the skillet, before abruptly telling Pait to watch the bacon and leaving the room. But the moment he was gone, Pait just slid the skillet off the hotstone so it wouldn’t burn, stuffed her face with a handful of greasy, crispy bacon that had already cooled enough to eat, and tiptoed after him. At the front door (the front opening, really, since it didn’t have an actual door) she heard someone explaining that one of the lifts wasn’t working, and they needed Daivad to come fix it so they could bring the building materials up to one of the new houses.

Though Pait didn’t want to admit it, even to herself, the lifts and zip-lines intrigued her. Daivad claimed you didn’t have to be a practitioner to use them—he’d even let her control one of the lifts they’d used on their little tour yesterday, and she certainly didn’t practice magic. But still, she couldn’t wrap her head around it. How was it possible you just threw a lever and then things were moving? With enough power to haul his bulk up and up and up into the trees like he weighed nothing?

She’d heard of the Steelsmith Queen’s metal machines that turned objects into power. She’d heard, of course, of the trains that could haul hundreds of people and enormous crates of any and every type of material—faster even than a horse, and without using any magic. But she’d never seen one—Luvatha, known for its celebration of Chaos, had never implemented any of the queen’s new Ordered machinery. They didn’t even have a train station within the walls. And Pait was very curious to learn more about these strange contraptions, to pull them all apart and figure out how they worked. So, when Daivad cleared up their breakfast and headed out, Pait tagged along. Not like she had anything better to do.

“What lives in there?” Pait asked, her eyes on the big metal box hanging from a handle in Daivad’s hand as they crossed a massive, twisting branch-bridge.

“Tools.”

“You know how those ‘machines’ work?”

“I know enough.”

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“Your mom taught you?”

In a low growl, he said, “She is not my mother.”

Pait could understand the sentiment. “The queen, then.”

After a beat, he gave a begrudging, “Yeah.”

They were near enough to the main area of the village now that people passing by on their way to whatever jobs they did here were within earshot, and Pait didn’t think he’d be eager to keep talking about the queen in public, so she dropped it.

When they neared the lift, situated at the edge of a large landing next to a branch-bridge that led to a cluster of new, half-built houses, Pait expected Daivad to head toward it—but instead he started up winding steps to a much smaller landing directly over the lift. Once on the landing, Daivad dropped the toolbox with a crash and approached a big cluster of vines hanging down the trunk of the tree. He pulled back the vines and tied them out of the way, revealing a carved out section of the tree in which a big, mind-boggling mess of gears and belts and odd, intricate chains and a great big vaguely-box-shaped metal object.

Everything was still at the moment, but Pait could see, almost like a visual echo, the way all the pieces of this massive puzzle would move together. She could feel what each piece wanted, what would make them dance, and her gaze followed along the inherent movement of this metal beast, trying to puzzle out where on earth the power to set them all in motion could come from. But along the way, her eyes snagged on a break in the flow. A gear that seemed to be the end of the line of movement, nothing for its teeth to grab onto.

Pait said nothing as Daivad laid a hand on a flat part of the box-thing and waited. She almost expected the contraption to surge to life. But then he looked around, his eyes falling on the same gear she had spotted, the break in the flow.

“Hm.” He knelt, peering under the box-thing, so Pait knelt too—and she saw it. A snapped belt that had fallen to the floor.

While Daivad opened the toolbox and fished out a tool long enough that he could use it to slide in there and fish out the belt, Pait straightened and reexamined the gear—yes, she could see now. The belt should have been connecting the gear to a wheel, which it would spin, turning the next piece in the puzzle, that moved the next piece, until… Her eyes moved finally to the cables, which she followed further into the carved section of the tree. She stepped around Daivad, deeper into the tree.

“Ay!” he said. “Careful!”

She saw why. Though there was a wooden railing in place, it was low enough she could have easily fallen over—into a great, carved hole that seemed to extend all the way to the ground, a chain dangling down its center. The hole was dark enough Pait couldn’t see the bottom.

“What lives down there?”

“The counterweight.”

Pait cocked her head, brow furrowed, still staring into the hole. It clicked into place, and then her brain was moving like a machine—all the pieces, the ideas flowing one into the other. Yes—a counterweight to balance it out. The lift was up right now, and it was whatever hung on the other end of this chain that kept it balanced, like the see-saws she had played on as a kid. But then how was an empty lift enough to raise the counterweight when the lift needed to be lowered? Or did there have to be enough weight … no, that didn’t make sense, she’d seen the empty lift be lowered yesterday.

Daivad had fished the broken belt out and stood. “I need to fetch a fresh belt from stor—”

Pait pointed at the machine between them and said emphatically, “All that knowledge in your head? Give it to me.”