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He cast one final look at the machinery, tightening a bolt here and flicking a fingernail against a coil there. The welding was practically seamless, and the patterns were elegant in their simplicity. It should work, the young man thought. With a flutter of anticipation, he closed the chassis door and started climbing back down. He had checked and rechecked his figures, done as much research into the pattern magic as possible, on top of spending every waking minute in the last three months on this project: Julius Cales had built a radio tower.

He dropped down the last two rungs and hurried around to the front door of the cabin they had built to house the radio's main component, a reconstructed military audiomatric resonator that the young engineer had salvaged more than a year ago. Julius had stripped the technology down to its basic components and spent months learning how each pattern worked with each other. When he finally learned how to put it back together (and that took far longer than learning how to take it apart) he set upon the task of making it bigger. Easier said than done, the young man had finally conceded the battle to do it on his own a few weeks prior and enlisted the help of a couple of interested engineers from the shop. As soon as he wasn't bouncing ideas alone in his own brain, the project took off but he knew no one would've put it together at all if not for him. The others knew it too, seeing as both Nathan and Darla were eagerly waiting for him to pull the switch.

"Conductor's set and waiting, how's the receiver doing?" Julius asked, throwing his thick gloves down on a nearby worktable and crossing the room to hover behind Darla's shoulder. Their command board was all bastardized components covered in different patterns, put together with less finesse than their tower had been, but the lights and gauges that measured the different energies in use seemed to be in working order. Darla Linari, a Yuleni graduate from Clover College that was studying with them for the summer, was doing some last-minute calculations on a scrap of paper.

"The zelkind are stabilized, and the Thaddeus Flood numbers are well within range," Darla said with an indulgent flourish in her script as she finished the numbers. Nathan Bayliss, as much a permanent fixture in Wheelis as the shop Julius and he called home, walked back from the window with a bit of a manic grin.

"The wind's coming in northerly, so anything we get should be coming in from the Capital. At least we hope so, fellows, wish for luck," and he pulled on the small golden hoop he had in his right ear. Nathan stopped by Julius who had his teeth clamped down on the knuckle of his forefinger. The big man clapped him on the back, laughing lightly. "Stop worrying. You designed this and you're a genius, remember?"

"Self-proclaimed," Julius replied with a small laugh. He wiped the back of his hand on his pants and pulled on the goggles he had strung around his neck. The others took this as a cue and pulled on their own protective eye gear, Nathan a similar pair of goggles and Darla pulled down a welder's mask over her face.

"But you're sure this will work?" The Yuleni asked, looking up at Julius as he nodded fervently.

"Yeah! Yeah, mostly. It should work, anyways, and if it doesn't," he hesitated. "It'll explode. Come on! Let's turn it on."

Without another moment's notice or even a pause to acknowledge his companion's reactions, he pulled the switch, lighting up their command board like Solstice lights. They could all feel the hum of the massive conductor reacting to the different patterns of energies coursing in the wind that mundane humans were oblivious to every day. It was like the eerie feeling right before a lightning strike, and everything was holding until the main receiver began to glow too brightly.

"Raise the shields, the feed's overpowering the nephelite crystals," Julius snapped. Crossing over to the far corner of the cabin, Nathan was started yanking down on the pulleys they had arranged, but Darla cried out in dismay.

"The Flood numbers are rising! Four, five– Reveries, it's going to saturate the entire system." Panicked, she stood up and knocked her chair over. She reached for the switch to turn it off, but Julius grabbed her arm and wrested her away from the command board. "Julius, it’s going to shatter!"

"No, it won't," he said, grabbing an octagonal dial and turning it carefully.

"Julius!"

"Nate, the shields?"

"Raised!" He said with a grunt of effort as he secured the pulley ropes.

"Just have to find the alpha glyph," Julius muttered to himself, turning the switch to the right and the left, but the hum in the air was quickly becoming a high-pitched whine. Darla and Nathan had both retreated to the back wall of the cabin, and the main receiver was dazzling bright like fire—then the whine suddenly wobbled, the tones modulated, and the cabin was overwhelmed by an unintelligible roar, forcing all three of them to cover their ears. Julius pressed his right ear to his shoulder, turning the dial another fraction of an inch and the noise suddenly became words, a clear message in the Sahalyian language.

“--broken up again, but authorities prevailed in routing the rebels from the Imperial Commission by morning. The enemy was last seen escaping through the sewer systems but a subsequent search has officials stating they had escaped the Gilded District. Outposts are ordered to keep watch for the following airships leaving the same day under suspicion of aiding and abetting the rebel forces: the Queen Pine, the Raleigh, the Mad Meena, the Synn Eater--”

"Braxton!" Darla shouted. In the midst of stretching jaws and rubbing sore ears, the other two winced at how loud her cry was but she pulled off her welder’s mask eagerly, grinning at them both. "The Gilded District, that’s in Braxton!"

"That's twenty miles north of Tremont," Nathan said in awe, striding around the others and looking at the numbers on the command board. "Levels are barely back in range but the shields are holding. We did it."

There was a moment of disbelief, still held under the spell of the words resonating throughout the walls of the cabin, when Julius suddenly cheered. All three of them started shouting and screaming, jumping up and down like they were all children again. As Darla hugged Nathan around the middle, Julius crossed over to the door and burst out of the cabin, whooping as he sprinted down the small incline. Before he lost his footing and tumbled all the way down, he paused, arms wheeling forward to catch his balance.

He threw both fists into the air. "I knew it wouldn't explode! I told you, I knew it!"

Julius' chest heaved from shouting, his eyes still alight with the sheer joy, but he suddenly had to take a deep breath to hold back his vexation, denied his moment of glory. He stomped down the rest of the small hillside to the lush grasses at the bottom of the path, and his shadow fell over the still figure of another man laid out on the ground. His brow furrowed and eyes of pale blue opened for moment then squinted as he focused on the frowning Julius above him. The man on the ground smiled, lips pulling back and showcasing a row of white teeth in sharp contrast to the trimmed mustache and beard he sported. "Hey, Jules," he said pleasantly. "Looks like you didn't explode."

"That's what I was trying to tell you but someone wasn't paying attention," the young engineer sighed and stood with one arm akimbo, doing his best to look slighted. The other man simply laughed and levered himself up to a sitting position, but when he looked up, Julius was still pouting, so he rolled his eyes and cleared his throat dramatically.

"Jules, by skies, you've done it! You're actually the genius you tell people you are!" He exclaimed with over-the-top enthusiasm, raising both hands in the air and twisting them back and forth imitating applause. Julius flopped down on the ground with a wide grin, raising his hands and doing the same gesture. They both ended up laughing and falling back on the ground, and the engineer started talking rapidly about starting up the radio tower and how everything seemed to be working until the Pattern Matrices had gone wildly off kilter. He stopped suddenly when his friend slapped him on the shoulder and pointed to his right ear. Looking chastised, Julius sat up and made a circle on his chest with a closed fist, mouthing the word 'Sorry' before rolling over the other man's feet and landing on his left side, and they shared a smile.

"Now you may continue," he said, and with a proper invitation this time, Julius continued into the wild adventure the three studious engineers had that morning in turning on their radio tower.

It would be safe to say that he was only half-listening to his friend's rambling, because with only one functioning ear, all Myka Yellico could do was half-listen anyway. He had graduated from the Rede Academy more than a year ago, and when the Sahalyian Military rejected him for his auditory disability, he eventually found himself in Wheelis, studying the mechanics of airship engines. He wasn’t in town for more than two days before Julius and he became fast friends, and not even a month before he was accepted as an apprentice at the Yuasa Supply and Clinic. His eyes closed for a moment, still heavy from napping under the summer sun, and Myka ran a hand through the ear-length shag that he called hair, pushing it back from his forehead enough that one could see the elongated star-shaped scar on the corner of his right temple. It stretched past his hairline, and it was a mark that Myka bore that signaled the end of his hearing out of that ear. If he'd been taken to a healer right away, perhaps it could have been saved, but the man was often reminded he was lucky for scraping by with only that much taken away from him; it could have been his life.

A shadow passed over his eyes again, and he opened them to see Julius looking down at him with a familiar pout. Using his hands, he signed, 'Still can’t hear me or am I boring you?' Myka grinned, tapping his forefinger and middle finger against his thumb in a sign for 'No' several times.

"I heard you, I swear," he said out loud and Julius rolled his eyes. "No really, it was something like: science, science, science, I'm so much better than any Wizard of the High Court because my tower is bigger than theirs. Right? Did I get it?" He laughed, shielding himself half-heartedly from the handful of grass that Julius threw at him. After a brief war, they called a truce and helped pick out blades of grass that the other had missed, freeing them from collars, necks and hair.

Julius suddenly turned away and rolled up onto his feet.

"Enough celebrating!" He declared, holding out both hands for Myka's and he got them with no hesitation. His muscles bunched as he hoisted his friend back up to his feet. "Or in your case, napping. Let’s go back to the tower and figure out what went wrong."

"But I thought you got the transistors to work?" The deaf man frowned, smoothing the creases on his shirt.

"It works, sure, but not like we hoped," Julius said, unable to contain the joy he had from knowing that his invention had paid off. "We theorized that we could receive broadcasts from the capital city because they use the most generic patterns in the Empire. Instead, we're getting news from Braxton and that's even further north! Is the wind playing any factor in it, is it the shape of the shield we made around the crystals, did we get the patterns wrong on our end, or is it the angle of the mountain we built it in? So many of the farspeaker patterns are kept secret by the military, so we have absolutely no clue," the man looked absurdly happy in saying that. "We'll have to start mapping the archetypes in accordance to what we're hearing, record every word that translates down to us, and chart what variables could be affecting the receiver."

"Science, science, science," Myka muttered.

"The project's just begun!" The engineer jumped up in excitement, and Myka shoved him with a laugh. As light as the push may have been, Julius still danced away, holding his right elbow tenderly. "Ah, bad arm, bad arm."

"The accident was a month ago, thirty-three days counting today. My injury was twice the size of yours and I'm just fine," he said accusingly, raising a skeptic eyebrow. Julius sniffed derisively and pushed his bottom lip out.

"That's because I am a delicate flower."

"You're a weather balloon is what you are," Myka offered, grinning. "Full of hot air." Fingers clasping one another, the man stretched both arms above his head and flinched when he felt a twinge from his left side, lowering his limbs more carefully as Julius pointed and crowed triumphantly.

"See? It's still bothering you too!"

"Speaking of balloons," Myka kept right on talking, ignoring the look on Julius' face. "I saw a ship come in a couple of hours ago. An SMS frigate-class, couldn't see the name. I hope it was the lighting, but I think it was painted yellow. Like, a bright yellow."

"What a terrible thing to do to a ship," Julius commented idly, lost in thought for a moment before smiling at his friend. "Do you want to go back down to the shop with me? I'll run over and tell Nate and Darla that we're going. We can bring them back dinner or something, but I want to finish that letter for Frederic before the ship leaves."

"So my options are, go with you or stay here and listen to your science buddies?" Myka sighed, theatrically pondering it as Julius rolled his eyes and motioned him to come along. "Wait, wait, I'm still thinking about it."

They both stopped in at the cabin and ended up staying another hour as Julius joined in with the fevered excitement in setting up a comprehensive strategy for mapping out what their invention could do. Despite his professed disinterest, Myka managed to make a few contributions to the conversation. He helped in simple things like double-checking measurements but he was also a good balance in putting down the imaginative engineers when Darla claimed it must be some evil spirit upsetting the calculations. They eventually all agreed that nothing had been done incorrectly, and all they could do was gather more information.

"I'll talk to an old friend from the Academy," Myka said. "He's discreet and I'm sure he could help us. We need some cleaner method of identifying which patterns are in use. You can't just make the tower bigger, Jules." He looked pointedly at Julius but the young man was grinning helplessly.

"We, Myka?" He waggled his eyebrows, and the other two laughed. “Are we science buddies now?”

That was when Myka decided it was time to return to the shop.

After a lengthy farewell, the two were outside and heading down the hills where the tower and the cabin resided. The late summer sun bathed the valley below in golden light, disappearing among the white plumes of steam that came up from several shops and smithies in Wheelis.

When Julius was only three years old, Evelyn Cales, his mother, founded the Yuasa Supply and Clinic in the small village of Wheelis. With her influence, the valley eventually became a haven of learned men and women that shared a passion for expanding humanity's current grasp on the sciences of pattern magic and steam-powered engineering. As the young men passed the city limits, they were slowed down by passersby, people that Julius had grown up around and befriended. Myka constantly teased him about it, calling him the 'Prince of Wheelis', but in truth, the young man was slightly jealous. He didn't know if his friend was just a product of such a goodly, tightknit community, or if others were drawn to reach out to Julius because of who the engineer was. The deaf man didn't dwell on it long, happy to be counted among Julius' friends and leave it at that. They stopped several times by different yards and shops to talk mechanics or trade gossip, as news flew faster than airships in Wheelis. By the time they made it to Yuasa, the city lamps were turning on, the familiar orange glow of the pattern spells bright and steady. Their final destination was a sturdy and humble house built behind the shop, the lights inside already on.

Julius tapped Myka on the shoulder, motioning the other to follow him around to the back so they wouldn’t track mud through the house. Stepping into a small slush room, they both took off their shoes and Julius hurried inside, making a beeline for his room. He shed another layer, tossing his knit sweater onto his bed followed by Myka who fell backward into the plush mattress and groaned. He made a sharper noise when Julius flung his goggles at the other's chest but let them lie there, pulling the engineer’s sweater over his face and grumbling quietly as he slowly relaxed again. "Don't fall asleep on my bed," Julius warned, pulling on Myka’s foot. "I mean it, you remember last time."

"You slept on the floor and I had a very nice nap," he said, muffled through the wool. Julius rolled his eyes, cheeks reddening slightly.

"Well, I wasn't going to dump you out on the rug or anything," he muttered, casting about his desk but there was nothing on or under the various sketches and scientific drabbles. He searched the bookshelves and found nothing but past letters he had received, papers that were soft from how many times they had been refolded. Frustrated, he walked out into the hallway and straight to the receiving room in front, but a cursory glance yielded nothing. Julius checked the little shrine tucked into the corner of the room, somewhere he often put things too important to trust his scatterbrained memory to remember, but there was nothing there either.

All the same, he slowed down and lit a fresh candle in front of three hand-carved statues. He pressed his palms together and after closing his eyes, whispered a soft prayer to his ancestors and wished them well in the afterlife. Julius was second-generation Sahalyian, but his family was of Qian origin, a race of people native to the islands in the southern areas of the Bienne Sea. Their customs weren’t his, and the names of the gods of the Trithist Faith came out of his mouth more often than not, but Julius and his mother kept some traditions.

"Mama!" He called, stepping back and looking around the room again, flipping over the cushions of the couch just to be safe. "Did you see where my letter to Frederic went?" Why would it be under the rug? Julius was thorough and checked anyway. "Myka spotted a ship, and I want to send it with the crew before they leave town." He walked over to the kitchen, opening his mouth to speak again when he was stopped by a flash of hazel eyes and a knowing smile.

"Would you rather just tell me what it said?"

"Frederic!"

"I can still read the letter when you find it, I'll act surprised," the Sahalyian captain grinned, his eyes following Julius as the younger man rounded the kitchen table and hugged him around the shoulders from behind. Beside Frederic, Evelyn sat sipping her tea and she smiled fondly when the two greeted each other. Unsurprisingly, their embrace ended up upsetting both their injuries and they demanded explanations of the other at the same time, happy and concerned in equal measure. "Evelyn said there was an accident at the foundry?"

"Oh no, you first!" Julius demanded, trying to peek in through Frederic's sling at his mechanical arm. He moaned in dismay. "What in Marlea's sweet name did you do to such fine craftsmanship? Just look at it!"

"Julius," Evelyn said warningly and the man bit his lip and sat down on Frederic's other side quietly. For all that he was his own man, even surpassing Evelyn's skill with some of his own works, Julius would never stop being his mother's son. They both shared the same leather-tanned skin from the Trenachi Islands, the hooded eyes and flat nose. The only difference was that Evelyn had a bit of curl to her shoulder-length locks and though Julius kept it short, his hair was so straight it laid flat even in the most humid weather.

"There's a woman sleeping in my bed," standing at the archway to the kitchen, Myka looked questioningly at the small gathering. Evelyn stood up and the other two, taught manners by the same woman, rose to their feet as well.

"Myka, dear, that's Georgia Lulos. She'll be staying with us while Yuasa builds her a new leg," she said, rounding the corner of the kitchen table. "I'd better check on her anyways. Introduce yourself, there's more tea and cakes in the pantry."

He watched her go, scratching his beard in consternation. Blinking his pale blue eyes, he looked back at Julius, still frowning as he glanced between him and their visitor. "Why does your mom think I don't know where the cakes are?"

"She's just being polite," Julius answered, waving away the man's discomfort in the face of his own excitement. "Myka, meet my best friend, Frederic Lassiter. We grew up together and he's practically my brother, so he lets me call him Freddie no matter how much he hates it. Freddie, this is Myka Yellico. He moved here last year and he wouldn't stop following me around the shop, so Mama said I could keep him."

"Likely it was the other way around. I'm sure you wouldn’t let him hear the end of it until he agreed to move in, Jules," Frederic said, smirking at the younger man who immediately squawked in protest and then quieted when he thought about it. He laughed at the truths Julius wasn't offering and held out his left hand to Myka. "Sorry, my right's in need of repairs at the moment."

"You need a whole new arm, is more like," Julius commented as the other two shook hands, oblivious to how they held on for a moment too long, eyes guarded. The engineer simply walked over to Frederic's right side and again tried to peel back the man's sling and got slapped on the wrist for his efforts. Sighing petulantly, the Qian sighed. "You should've seen it, Myka, when it was still working, of course. It was one of Mama's best and now he’s ruined it."

"It's not like I did it on purpose," Frederic reproached, stepping back and turning to face Julius. Myka stayed where he was, shrugging and resettling the folds of his oversized jacket. "The best mechanic in the world makes you an arm, it's forever. Or at least I thought it would be."

"Right," Julius breathed, his eyes widening. "The raid on Tierra Lue! All the mechanics were talking about it last week.” He grabbed the transhuman's shoulder, looking excited as he asked, "Did you really take out a whole rebel army, a sword in one arm and the beautiful prince in the other? I know you can't believe half the stories that come out of Tremont, but knowing you, it sounded like it might be true." He was the only one that laughed, noticing almost comically late that Frederic wasn't looking at him.

Instead, he was looking at the hand Julius had rested on his shoulder, fixed on it like an anchor. Frederic felt that roiling in the pit of his stomach again. Just the idea of talking about it made his throat close up and his lungs constrict until he thought he would never take another breath. The quiet that followed stretched on too long, but when the captain raised his eyes, he only saw understanding in Julius’ face. The Qian man smiled sadly. "We'll put on a giant pot of tea and bring out all the cakes in the pantry, don't fret. Fine, we’ll leave some for the women. How about it, Myka?"

"No," the two looked back at him, Frederic puzzled and Julius shocked. The deaf man took a step back, gesturing half-heartedly away from there. "I mean, I should go. I promised I'd help Missus Adams alphabetize the new shipment of books from the university. I'll be back later and you two can catch up." Myka vanished through the front door before either one of them could protest. When the captain looked back at him, Julius looked crestfallen.

"Something I said?" Frederic asked softly, but the other just shrugged his shoulders, visibly upset and trying to make light of it.

"Don't worry about it," he replied, clearing his throat. "He's just shy around new people, is all. He"ll be better tomorrow morning. You are staying that long, right?" The captain nodded and he was glad to see the smile restored on Julius' face. "Then how about a walk instead?"