The typewriter proved, at first glance, to be a poor investment for a daring aerial escape.

Kallista had been drawn to the typewriter from the moment she viewed it languishing in a Museum of Curioddities, a pun that 3% of Pennon City’s citizens might appreciate, if one rounded to the nearest human. The jury was out as to whether the placard’s sententious overview of Strange Olde Anti-Fae Percussive Instruments was someone’s idea of trolling or, equally likely, an exercise in mellifluous snake oil. Anti-Fae charms and tchotchkes were all the rage ever since the queen’s latest unpopular alliance, or “alliance.”

No one will miss this, she thought optimistically—twenty minutes gone. She planned to pen a stern letter to the curators, rebuking them for shoddy upkeep. As far as she could tell, some drunk transcriptionist had spilled a ledger’s worth of ink over the machine, leaving a sticky dark residue. She’d seen less comprehensively blackened coal mines, a so-called childhood career path she was not eager to return to.

“You were supposed to be the solution,” Kallista muttered as she crouched in the museum’s cloakroom, listening for the guards’ heavy footfalls. Steal a rare artifact, fence it—never mind that aerialists weren’t supposed to traffic with that stratum of society—and buy her commission back. What could be simpler?

Her palms cramped on the aggravatingly hefty machine. Its edges bit into her palms. The typewriter might be “portable” by the standards of some well-heeled undercover journalist, the kind with a servant, but she hadn’t thought to purloin a carrying case ahead of time.

Some revoltingly stubborn part of her refused to loosen her grip or exchange the typewriter for a lighter item. At this rate she was going to nick an artery on it, since she didn’t have a blunt spoon.

Kallista yearned for the weight and resistance of the throttle, the roar of propellers, the sweet inhalation burn of her biplane’s smoke. Faerie fuel permitted it to fly distances previously achieved only by dragon cavalry. The intoxicating effects of the smoke only became well known some years after the founding of the Aerialist Corps, an addiction Kallista would have repeated a hundred times over: Better the upward-rising smoke of flight, of self-conflagratory battle, than the miserable lightless grit of the mines.

A belated surveillance of the coats around her suggested she’d chosen her loot more poorly than she’d realized. She could anatomize the problem to her heart’s content after she escaped.

She’d swept by the cloakroom on the way in, sweltering beneath the lumpy greatcoat that concealed her sky-and-silver uniform. Sky-and-silver, once; now the silver piping and braid were storm-dark, storm-tarnished, reflecting her current status. The uniform’s damnably high collar made the greatcoat mandatory. Nothing else she owned would have covered up the collar with its telltale colors, which would have revealed her identity—her disgrace—to anyone with half an eye.

Even if Kallista hadn’t been bound by the disciplinary geas to wear the tarnish of disgrace, she would have clung to her uniform and the memory of flight.

If she hadn’t been in a rush, she would have inspected the brooding coats and jackets more closely on her way in, ascertained the nature of the threat. She availed herself of the opportunity now. A handsome array of outer garments, to be sure. Gold buttons, winking hatpins of new-polished silver, brooches of beaten bronze . . . and not a single morsel of cold iron.

It wasn’t her fault—strictly—that she’d been cashiered from the Aerialist Corps. No reasonable person would have expected that fetching lady to be an admiral’s daughter. Especially not a lady who lingered in parlors where people passed around Fae-leaf cigars as freely as bawdy rhyme.

I was made to fly, Kallista thought, irked by everything: the sweat that plastered her uniform to her skin and her own sour reek; the aftertaste of Fae-leaf, faintly redolent of skyward smoke; the unfairness of fetching ladies who made overtures to an aerialist the night before her tour of duty without disclosing important particulars about their family connections. How can I fly when I’ve been barred from my machine?

Kallista succumbed at last to the dust and the sharp smell of camphor, and sneezed.

As she did so, a guard’s tread announced itself to her ears. Her hopes that someone had merely knocked down some heirloom pepper mill were dashed when she next heard the fluting garble of Faerie speech, rising in pitch and urgency, and more footsteps.

Kallista cursed and banged her hand down on the keys, no longer able to contain her rage.

The room blurred as though veiled by a mist of missed opportunities. Her eyes smarted; her palm stung with the fresh imprint of unexpected logorrhea spiced with blood where she’d ripped her skin open. Through that veil, she discerned words in poorly kerned typescript, ink-dark upon the parchment of her misspent nights:

I AM YOUR MACHINE

Transfixed, Kallista stared at the words, then shook her head. The heat was getting to her.

I AM YOUR MACHINE

The footsteps beat closer, closer, with an urgency like that of her own skyward heart.

I AM YOUR MACHINE

She knew, in the way of dreams and drugged assignations, that the offer, of sorceries unknown, would not be made a fourth time.

“If you’re my machine,” Kallista snarled, snatching up the typewriter and straightening so abruptly her back spasmed, “let’s fly.”

Damned if she was going to submit quietly, besmirched admiral’s daughter or no.

The machine brightened—lightened—moment by moment. It admitted no more weight than the airy mass of her aspirations. The smudged dark residue sloughed away to reveal the brightness of silver: Fae silver, not the more usual iron or steel, the mirror-sheen of her own hopes reflected back to her, a dazzlement of defiance. Kallista no longer heard the footsteps, the fluting voices, over the ringing of bells aslant the waking world.

Kallista had dozed through all three mandatory lectures on interfacing with Fae technology during basic training, but even she understood the bargain. Why not? What did she have to lose, but the plane they had taken from her already?

“A typewriter has no propeller,” she said, half-questioning, all-challenging. “You’re the least aerodynamic object in a ten-mile radius. You don’t have wings—”

The typewriter, gleaming, had shed all the world’s weight. Kallista’s back no longer hurt. The greatcoat, despite its heavy fulled wool, revealed the lambent colors of the aerialist’s uniform beneath it, as though illumined by the light of years to come.

WORDS ARE WINGS

The cloakroom’s doors slammed open.

In that moment, Kallista, no devotee of the transcriptionist’s arts, slammed her hands unergonomically upon the typewriter’s keys with their steganography of tarnish and ink, joining her blood to the machine. Together they translated themselves out of the museum, soaring on wings of word.