Somewhere, down in the lovely bowels of an ugly ship—or was it the other way ‘round? He could never be sure—the oppressive heat was largely ignored by the closest thing to a mechanic the crew really had. Whatever might be true of his educational status in the matter, Lysander could keep the engine running, even if he did do it with bailing wire and tape more often than not. Genius was, after all, that which operated outside the petty norms of things like convention and (often) good sense. It wasn’t like anyone else ever came down here to check on the heart of the ship—because they didn’t need to. There weren’t any problems to be checked on. Empirical confirmation of an abstract hypothesis. Beautiful.

She was a complex lady, full of moving parts, little idiosyncrasies and ticks and bits of selective neurosis that would have sent another man running years ago. But Lysander Islinger, in his own humble opinion, was not most men. Flighty, not too far shy of neurotic himself, capricious, and often absurd, he was nevertheless capable of patience and innovation when he wished to be, or more precisely when the she-phantom that sometimes gave and sometimes stole from him his inspiration desired him to be. This, his craft, was not only science, but art, and art was subject to the whims of the muse.

Fortunately, science was in fact enough to keep the ship in the air when art wasn’t quite cooperating. Fancy that.

It was certainly stifling in the room, the engine’s output only making the ambient heat from the atmosphere that much worse, creating a cauldron of wet warmth that did not fail to plaster his shirt to his back nor his hair to his forehead. Not that Lysander noticed, of course. The body could and would suffer under the shackles of circumstance. The mind was more than that. Well… and he was bad at paying attention to anything else when a problem held his focus. A bead of sweat formed on his forehead and ran with unerring precision down the bridge of his crooked nose, dangling for just a moment at the very tip of it, as though on a precipice. Then it fell, unheeded, to splash the series of cogs and gears that the boatswain currently examined.

The general whir of the engine was interrupted every once in a while by a periodic grinding sound, and the cause seemed to be that one of the gears had been warped by the recent turn of the weather. It now did not occupy the exact dimensions it once had, and was scraping cacophonously against the one to its left every time they intersected a certain way. Lysander added a few new cogs to the mental list of purchases to make for the vessel next time they landed, but for now… he hopped down from the perch he’d occupied atop the cylindrical engine shaft, grabbing a metal file from the box of equipment he kept in the engine room, then opened one of the side panels of the cylinder, allowing him to pass through a gap in the piping and machinery to stand inside the engine. A series of levers rested on a panel to his right, and his fingers flicked idly over several of them, until an idea came to him, and he grinned.

It was not an expression of outright joy. Far from it: crooked and wry, it seemed more like the sort of expression one might wear in the company of people one dislikes, when something unfortunate but not fatal occurred to the worst of the lot. For a moment, his hand tightened on one of the levers. Just a bit—lose a few hundred feet of altitude, no big deal—but then he shook his head, recalling something else. There was a job today. If he knew Annie (and so help them both, he did), she would already be flipping her lid—quietly, yes, maturely, probably—but the anxiety would be present all the same. It gave him enough pause that he passed over the lever he’d been planning to flip and depressed the proper one instead. There was a loud shift in the pitch of the engine’s hum, as the work it was doing was shifted away from the section he’d shut down, so that he could file the warped gear down to size and put everything back in working order.

Really. The sacrifices he made sometimes. Lysander shook his head at himself, but was soon enough distracted by his task, and didn’t bother considering it any further.