Fall of Sky City (A Steampunk Fantasy Sci-Fi Adventure Novel) (Devices of War) by SM Blooding

had come over me? What had I done?
    She tucked a finger under my chin and raised my face to meet her gaze. A single ebony eyebrow rose. “You may go to the laboratory.” She stood smoothly and headed toward the door. “Just so long as you remember you are mine. You will always belong to me.”
    As the door closed, I should have felt victorious.
    But instead I felt as though I’d just lost something.

CHAPTER 8

    TO ESCAPE SKY CITY
    Nix didn’t just accept the kiss as payment. She also doubled my class load, including three courses on using magicks.
    I didn’t mind. I was eager to figure out how to use my “most powerful” abilities. There had to be some benefit to having the greatest Mark in history.
    Somehow, I was going to find a way to use it against her.
    As the weeks passed, she spent less and less time in my quarters, leaving me to my own devices. Granted, in order to keep up with the demanding schedule she’d set up for me, I spent nearly all of my free time on homework.
    In magick studies, however, I wasn’t learning a lot I could actually use. I was still in theory, not practical application. A part of me wondered if she was holding back because she didn’t yet trust me. That was entirely possible. She liked to test people and I had absolutely no doubt that she was testing me.
    When I was alone in my quarters, I turned the theory into practical application.
    I found I could heat the temperature of my body to the point where rolls of steam poured off of me. It made me dehydrated, but if I drank plenty of water, I found I could keep my body at a high temperature for days and weeks on end.
    The practical application for that, of course, was easy. When you live your life on an airship where it’s always cold no matter the season, having an internal radiator is a good thing. There were days when even the gold-ringed ice-eating slugs couldn’t keep the ice off the rigging. Frozen rigging could be disastrous.
    That thought led to the next question. If I could do that, why couldn’t I heat an entire vessel?
    Water was an easy thing to conduct heat through, and I practiced this often in the bath. The metal the city was built out of was also an excellent conductor though it had a lot of resistance, and bricks were good for storing heat.
    Joshua and I had other ideas and concepts for what could be done with my “incredible gifts.” He’d developed a metal combining the source metal of the city with cadmium and copernicium. We were looking for something with less resistance. At one point, we’d attempted to add gold to the mixture since it was a softer metal, but we’d nearly blown up the laboratory.
    The device we were working on was a pistol I could use to conduct my magickal energies through. I held our latest version in my hands, a pair of mirrored goggles covering my eyes. I looked over at the tall red-headed man. “Ready?”
    He nodded once, snapping his goggles into place.
    There was a commotion behind me. We were supposed to be alone in the laboratory when conducting our experiments, a ruling that had been set down after we’d nearly killed everyone in a two decametre radius. I turned to see Keeley and her friend Yvette.
    I adjusted the setting to hide my blush. I don’t know what it was about Keeley, but whenever she was in the room, I felt happy. Warm, like I belonged. A part of me said it was just the fact that Nix had stripped away all my friends and family. I was used to being close to others. Here, I was isolated. I’d never been so alone in my entire life.
    Yvette, however, didn’t belong, and to hear her complain, you’d think she’d find someone else a little more fashion forward and shallow to converse with, but no. She liked spending her time with us. She was taller than Keeley, but only because of those ridiculous heels she insisted on wearing. She wore the blue and silver of the House of Swords. She looked absurd with her frills and her frocks and those—I shook my head and turned