"At this meeting of the White Chasm Aviation Club," Quinn said, "I want to discuss my Three Axis Theory of aircraft control."

Kiera looking frightened.

"Vince has pointed out in his paintings of birds that the tips of the wings can be warped up or down, each wing being warped opposite the other, so that birds can fly." Quinn said. "So this is the first axis, surfaces on the end of the wings that go up or down. The second axis is on the tail. It is a pair of surfaces that go up or down on that smaller wing in the back. This controls the pitch. You can point the nose up or down with that control. These two axis of control can be wired to a stick in front of the pilot. The question I want to answer in this meeting of the Aviation Club, is how the pilot can physically control a third axis."

"Why would we need a third axis?" Vince asked. "Birds have wings and tails, why would we need more than that?"

"The third axis is the rudder, like a ship's rudder," Quinn said. "A vertical fin extending off the tail. I don't exactly now when we would use this surface, but I want to add it just in case it's needed. This is related to my three axis theory, To me, flying these machines will be like riding a bike, and with practice a pilot will be able to keep the nose straight without expending too much energy."

"Princess Kiera," Seth said. "Do you have any ideas?"

"Um, do you think maybe, you could, uh, use your feet?" Kiera said.

"Feet?" Quinn asked.

"To you know, uh, control the rudder." Kiera said.

Quinn nodded. "A stick for the first two axis, and the feet for the third. Kind of like riding a horse. Yes, this could work."

The boys began to frantically design the cable and lever system that would allow such a three-axis control scheme to work. Kiera mostly just recorded the list of books that they referenced and took detailed notes about the things that they said.

"Have you ever been in a balloon?" Kiera asked.

"I went up in a balloon once," Quinn said. "It was deeply disappointing. Most people think that balloons are flying machines, in fact if you ask a person to draw a flying machine they would probably draw a balloon."

"You didn't like it?"

"It was boring. The thing didn't fly very high and it was tethered to the ground with a long rope. Seth was able to convince the old men who ran the thing to allow him to carry his kite up there, and he jumped off and flew down to the ground. The idiot. I was absolutely certain my brother was going to die."

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"You love your brother?" She asked. Quinn said nothing.

"Do you have brothers?"

"I did, but they, uh, died trying to protect Sasha when she was kidnapped. I miss them." She looked very disturbed. After a moment Quinn saw that she was beginning to cry.

"I am sorry that you lost your brothers," Quinn said. "I can't think of what would happen if Seth was killed."

"Then why do you keep insisting on inventing a flying machine!?" Kiera said. "Have you been to the graveyard, do you know how all those kids died?"

Seth, who seemed to have been paying attention to the conversation, approached them and said "I think she makes a good point. We should research how all those other students died and figure out how we can avoid repeating their mistakes."

Quinn attempted to do so, though the actual records of those students had been erased for some reason, and the professors refused to answer his questions. Over the following weeks Quinn found the most reliable source of information was firsthand accounts from previous generations of students who had gone on to perform menial jobs, making ice for the restaurants or operating sunlamps at the Spire.

"He strapped a rocket to a big wing and flew very high," one old man said. "However he ended up falling out of the sky and his body broke on the ground. His corpse was cold, cold. Covered in frost, he was."

"It was the snow, I think," another old man said, when asked about a different student. "The snow stuck to the wings and the wings broke apart! He fell. Terrible! Terrible! You should have heard his screams. This was, oh, sixty years ago."

Quinn roamed about the city, crossing countless bridges that spanned the chasm to speak with an equally countless number of old men who had been to the University at White Chasm and had friends who died trying to invent the flying machine. The general theme was that they tried to fly when it was cold and ice buildup on the wings caused the shape of the wings to change, or the wings fell off entirely.

At the next meeting of the Aviation Club, Quinn finally addressed Kiera directly for the first time. "Kiera, how do you think we should stay safe when flying?"

"Maybe, uh," Kiera said, "you could keep a list of everything that could go wrong and then check that it's impossible for that."

"I agree with this strategy," Bjorn said. "Even if we make mistakes and die, then future students will have access to our lists and they will refrain from making the same mistakes that we make."

"Birds don't have checklists," Vince said. "We should try and design the flying machines to have the lessons of our checklists encoded into the design."

"If possible," Seth said. "Otherwise, we can just expect a competent pilot to do a good job. Take a risk, roll the dice."

"Very well," Quinn said. "Kiera, please record our very first rule for pilots. Check for ice! Lots of pilots have died because ice changed the shape of the wings, and I think we need to make it a standard procedure to check for ice."

Kiera looked horrified.

"Is something wrong?" Seth asked, a rare occurrence of interacting with the woman without being directly addressed.

Kiera had tears in her eyes. "You should be certain to not test the kite when it is cold," Kiera said. "And this world tends to be, very, very cold."

Quinn was astonished. Did this woman know something about flying machines? She was a Heritor after all. And King Edwin has been somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of working on a flying machine. Kiera was a mystery, though, perhaps not as mysterious as the problem of flight itself. However, the idea of the checklists was a good one.

"Vince," Quinn said. "Birds do not have checklists, but we are not birds. I want you to prepare an official checklist for the club."