Page 2
Words on this page
Loudspeaker “Minor fluctuation! Remain calm!”
Read the whole story
The story the pages were drawn from, in full — for reading aloud, or for a child who wants the words without the pictures.
Elara heard the Great Steam Core cough before anyone else did.
Thunk—hiss—thunk… wheeze.
She stopped halfway down a ladder in the Lower Depths, grease on her nose and a wrench in her pocket. Above her, the pipes trembled. Then every lamp along the tunnel blinked out.
“Minor fluctuation!” boomed a brass loudspeaker. “Remain calm!”
Elara pressed her ear to the wall. The Core’s heartbeat was weak and uneven.
“It’s dying,” she whispered.
Nobody listened. The Guild of Engineers never listened to a skinny twelve-year-old who talked to machines.
So Elara climbed into the forbidden Old Sector, where broken clocks hung like bats and dust covered the rails. There, beneath a toppled boiler, she found a rolled-up map.
It showed blue rivers. Green forests.
And a yellow circle labeled: SUN.
“A glowing sky potato,” said Rusty, the robot head Elara had found in a junk pile. He sat in a basket on her belt, one lens eye blinking. “Very suspicious.”
“It’s real,” Elara said. “The Guild lied.”
“People in shiny hats? Lying? My gears are shocked.”
All night, while the Lower Depths grew colder, Elara built. She bolted spider legs onto an old tea kettle boiler, fitted it with digging claws, and gave it a round brass hatch for a belly.
The Iron Mole stood up with a squeal.
It immediately stepped on Elara’s toolbox.
“Promising start,” Rusty said.
Steam enforcers clanked into the tunnel at dawn, their copper masks shining.
“Hand over the map!” one shouted.
The Iron Mole sneezed a cloud of soot.
PFFFFT!
The enforcers vanished in black smoke. Elara leaped into the cockpit. “Up we go!”
The Mole scuttled through ventilation shafts, bumping its kettle back on pipes, scraping its legs on grates, and accidentally dragging three laundry lines behind it like streamers.
Behind them came the enforcers.
Ahead was the sealed surface hatch.
The Core gave one last terrible cough.
Thunk… wheeze…
Elara listened through the Mole’s controls. “It needs heat,” she said. “Not more steam. Light!”
At the hatch, a giant rusted wheel blocked the way. Elara pulled every lever. Nothing happened.
Then Rusty rolled from his basket and wedged himself between two cracked wires.
“My finest moment,” he said. “Possibly my last. Do not make it sentimental.”
Sparks zipped across his metal cheeks.
The wheel groaned.
Elara pushed the Iron Mole’s digging claws against it. Its legs scrambled. Its boiler rattled. One claw slipped, spinning the Mole in a ridiculous circle.
“Less dancing!” Rusty crackled.
With a final heave, the hatch burst open.
Golden light poured down the shaft.
Not poisonous. Not burning.
Warm.
Elara climbed onto the Iron Mole’s round back. Above her stretched a blue sky so enormous that Gearhaven’s brass ceilings suddenly seemed very small.
Far below, people gathered in the streets as sunlight spilled through the open hatch, turning copper pipes bright as fire. The Great Steam Core answered with a steadier sound.
Thunk—hiss. Thunk—hiss.
Rusty’s lens flickered. “So,” he said, “what exactly is a tree?”
Elara grinned at the green forest beyond the hatch.
“Let’s go find out.”
