Nomad didn’t have much reason to care either way. “What does this have to do with my engine designs?”

“Show them the schematics,” Zeal said.

“The ghosts,” he said flatly, “are engineers.”

“No,” Zeal said. “They’re… Well, you’ll see.”

Nomad sighed and pressed his designs against the glass. The red eyes gathered around, faces crowding to see, mouths moving as they whispered—but they didn’t say anything intelligible. They inspected all seven pages, one at a time, as he held them up. Then they faded back into the mists.

Zeal waved to the side, where a man stood on watch. A worker? A guard? A clergyman? Some combination of the three? He engaged some machinery and lowered a piece of unrefined metal from storage. The chunk was wide and flat, with dirt still stuck to the bottom. It looked like it had pooled on the surface of the ground when it was liquid, then hardened there.

More such followed. Some copper, he thought, and a variety of other metals—while that first and largest piece had been mostly iron. It all entered the mists from the top, and Nomad realized with discomfort that there was no lid on this enclosure. Inside, the mist churned and grew brighter.

“What are they doing?” he asked Rebeke quietly.

“Building your machinery.”

“How, though?”

“We don’t know. You put in resources. You show them detailed instructions, and you get out the thing you want.”

“When a new settlement is founded,” Zeal said, “we always take some of the smoke. We’re not sure how far we can divide it—but it’s worked so far. You can transport it in special containment devices. We took some of it from Union, along with an older containment unit acquired by absorbing a smaller community.”

“How long will the fabrication take?” Nomad asked. If they were building something, why was the enclosure so silent?

“Depends,” Zeal said. “For something like this, under an hour. They’re faster when it’s something they’ve done before, though.”

Under an hour to fabricate complicated machinery? He wasn’t going to complain—though even if it was true, their deadline was going to be very tight.

The Sunlit Man Chapter 22