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space.
    Aiah takes a deep breath.
    “Nothing,” she says, “I found nothing.”
     

CHAPTER 3
     
    The lower platform, Grandshuk says, is the final station of the old eastward-bound pneuma line, hence the name Terminal. The leaking water pours across the platform into the pits where the old passenger elevators once were — apparently the old drain system works perfectly well, because the lake isn’t very deep.
    Grandshuk wants to go down the tunnels, lots of old metal and brick down there, but Aiah wants to get her team off the platform as soon as possible. There are big empty spaces behind the station, where complicated machinery, salvaged long ago, once turned the pneuma cars around and shot them to the upper platform. And there have to be air shafts that fed the compressors, and other stairways to bring the passengers down.
    “If the diver found a source, she’d need to get it to the surface,” Aiah says. “If we can find a connection in one of those shafts, we can track it back to the source, ne?”
    She takes the other stairways up, finds they’ve been cut off by new construction. The air shafts are huge, empty, drafty things, brick planted with old iron rungs leading to the surface. The rungs are wet with leakage or condensation and covered with rough flakes of rust. Aiah insists on textbook safety procedures, the team members clipping and unclipping safety lines as they clamber up and down. Drizzle mists down on her hardhat as she climbs. Her thighs ache with the effort.
    All the deliberate work takes time, and Aiah can use time to map the place thoroughly in her mind, to work out all the possible access routes to the station. She doesn’t want to keep walking down that waterfall again and again.
    In the darkness, it’s very easy to close her eyes and see the burning woman pulsing on the insides of her lids.
    The shift passes, then a few hours of the next shift. Finally the team drags itself back up the waterfall to the basement of the apartment building. The superintendent has long since vanished.
    “I want to get in a couple hours’ research first thing tomorrow on how far those tunnels extend,” Aiah says. “We don’t want to walk for ten radii tomorrow.”
    “We clock on at 08.00,” Grandshuk says.
    “Fine. Clock on by all means. But you don’t have to meet me here till 10:00.”
    A flash of paranoia makes her look at Grandshuk carefully, just to see if there’s a look of suspicion in his eyes, but all she can see is weariness.
    Outside there’s a solid wall of black cloud under the Shield. Chill rain pours down in solid sheets. The streets are full to the gutters and black, with the emergency lighting on. But it’s no more wet under the street scaffolding than it was in Terminal Station, so Aiah stays fairly comfortable on a walk to the nearest hardware store. She gets a strange look from the man who sells her a big padlock, then notices the Jaspeeri Nation sticker only on her way out.
    She returns to the Terminal Station entrance and puts the bright new padlock on the chain, then puts the key in her pocket.
    A glory hole, Aiah thinks. A river of power, vast and strong and limitless. And she’s the only one who knows about it.
    She doesn’t know what she’s going to do with it yet, but she’s thinking hard. She’s one of the Cunning People, after all.
    *
    Aiah leans against the wall of the Loeno elevator. Streaks of dirt run down her face and jumpsuit. Neighbors frown at her politely: she’s leaving dirty smudges on the elevator mirror glass. When the door opens she wearily shoulders her tote bag and marches out.
    It’s well past the start of third shift. She figures she’ll get about five hours’ sleep.
    After she left Terminal she went back to Rocketman to do the research she’d promised to do the next day. She finds documentation that relates to the transparencies that should have been in the map file, but which disappeared or decayed or got misfiled. The old pneuma had been