Chapter 1050: A Difficult Puzzle
A week later, Tilly set the name list on Roland’s desk.
“How did the recruitment go?” He poured tea for her and chose his words carefully. He had always felt an undercurrent of guilt when facing this woman—his nominal sister, who was not his sister. Except for Anna, whom he had told the truth of his own accord, Tilly had been the first to discover he was not the real Roland Wimbledon. When the flying demons attacked Neverwinter, her instinct to protect him had made one thing clear: she had accepted their alliance completely. The guilt in his chest had not moved at all.
He had taken the body of her brother. He had arrived with no explanation prepared and given none.
She had not blamed him. That was precisely what made it worse.
Of course, he kept none of this visible. People who demanded answers about certain things often died for them, and he knew this well. But the feeling was there, quiet and persistent, every time he looked at her.
“It went well, except for the numbers.” Tilly took the cup, blew across the surface, and drank. “I selected a hundred and twenty-four from the migrants and seventy-three from official residents. Less than two hundred in total. For fighting demons at the scale we’re planning, that’s a small force.”
“The beginning is always difficult.” He read through the list. “Once you’ve established what this is—once others see it working—the second round of recruitment will draw far more. And it won’t be limited to Neverwinter.”
He meant it. The longing to rise into the sky was not an invention of recent centuries. It was in the bones of civilization—present from the first time people looked at birds and looked at the stars and wanted to reach both. Whether imitating birds with wax and feathers, or floating in silk balloons, or building wondrous contraptions no one could quite explain, the attraction was universal. The explorers of the Society of Wondrous Crafts were the sharpest proof of it he had seen in this world.
The Air Force would not struggle to attract people.
What it would struggle with was producing pilots.
Training pilots was not easy even with a mature flight control system. In a world where the system was still being invented, the most important quality was talent. No fear of heights. Resistance to dizziness. Physical coordination. These were the floor, not the ceiling. Above them: spatial orientation, mechanical intuition, reaction speed. Some of these could be cultivated. Others were either present or absent.
The veterans of the First Army were reliable and obedient—he could bring a handful of standout soldiers over as core officers. But converting the whole pool into aviators was not feasible, and it was not the point.
New migrants were the better source. Knowledge could be taught. Talent had to be found.
Three thousand people had signed up within a week. Nearly two hundred qualified. By any measure, opening recruitment to temporary residents from the start had been the right call.
He turned to the last page and paused.
“Six people failed the oath?”
“Their thoughts didn’t match what they said.” Nightingale’s voice came from the edge of the room, where she had been invisible until now. “Vader took them for questioning. Two of the six were official residents of Neverwinter.”
Roland frowned.
He understood, in principle, that fickleness was ordinary. People changed. What had been loyalty this morning could be something else by evening. He had not expected permanent, unvarying faithfulness from everyone. And yet the actual fact of it—six people who had stood in that room and heard Tilly speak and watched the oath read aloud and still said one thing while thinking another—left a particular residue that wasn’t quite anger and wasn’t quite disappointment but was something uncomfortable between the two.
They had stood at the edge of something new.
They had chosen not to step through.
“Did you find out why?”
“I planned to report to you after completing the investigation.” Nightingale kept her tone entirely level—the practiced carelessness of someone who had decided how much effort to put into sounding casual. “They were purchased by a foreign merchant who wanted agents inside the army to collect information about the firearms. The constabulary moved, but only caught the merchant’s assistants at their lodgings. I had Summer reconstruct the history of the room. A letter emerged—connected to the old king’s city. The person behind it appears to be a nobleman. We have his appearance, his location, his identity. Soraya painted his portrait. The Animal Messenger carried it to Theo. He won’t be loose much longer.”
The discomfort lifted. Roland bit back the smile that wanted to appear.
The investigation model was genuinely unreasonable by any traditional standard, and the people it hunted had no answer for it.
“What’s funny?” Nightingale blinked at him.
“Nothing. You did good work.” He pressed the smile down the rest of the way. “Since they’re attached to the old system—since they won’t let it go—the North Slope mines still need hands. Send them there.”
It was not a surprise that remnant nobles were still trying. The feudal system had lasted nearly a thousand years and still stood intact in the other three kingdoms. It would not vanish because he wanted it to. What he had built was different, and what he had built was still new, and people who had built their lives on the old order would keep looking for openings. He knew that. He was prepared for it.
“Well.” Tilly cleared her throat and reset the conversation. “The trainee question is settled. Where is the plane?”
“Actually, Evelyn has recently finished a new variety of Chaos Drink—excellent taste. Do you want to try it?”
“Oh, wonderful—” She stopped herself. “We are talking about the plane. You don’t have a prototype yet, do you?”
Bingo.
“The trainees still need to start from basic reading and theory. If we only needed something for demonstration purposes, a glider could—”
“No.” Tilly’s voice had an edge he had not heard from her before. “Even a modified glider would be completely different in practice from a purpose-built aircraft—not to mention a new design. If I have not flown it myself, I cannot teach others to fly it. It is not enough for the trainees to eventually fly it. I need at least a month with the machine before training begins—to understand its handling, make adjustments, correct the Flight Manual. To say nothing of later modifications.” She looked at him directly. “You asked me to take charge of this. I take that seriously. Which means I have a right to insist that you do what you said you would do.”
Roland blinked. He was seeing a side of Tilly he had not encountered before.
She was genuinely fond of this. Not performing enthusiasm—genuinely, deeply fond of the thing that could fly and answer her ability.
His own problem was simpler and worse: he had underestimated the difficulty. A biplane was not a glider. Adding a power source and fuel system multiplied the complexity by a factor he had not fully accounted for. Even with access to everything in the Dream World—every reference, every diagram—designing a working prototype alone would take years.
“I understand.” He exhaled. “In two weeks, I’ll give you a finished prototype that flies.”
“Then it’s settled.” She sat back, and the edge was gone. “Where is the new Chaos Drink?”
After Tilly left—with a full bottle tucked under her arm—Nightingale’s voice came from behind him.
“Strange.”
“What is?”
“She calls you brother in public. Has done it several times, in front of people. But in private, she almost never does.” A pause. “Isn’t that strange?”
“Is it?” Roland turned the observation over. “But—why?”
“I don’t know either.”
They looked at each other across the quiet office, both of them stroking their chins, both arriving nowhere.