The Law of the Heart by Starling Boris

Author:Starling, Boris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2021-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

11

June–July 2016

It was properly hot now, summer squatting over the city and asserting its residency for the next few months. The days were becoming ever more humid, and the nights so warm that sleeping was sometimes difficult until the small hours brought both exhaustion and a sufficient cooling of the air.

Mallima was taking shape. Once the supports were in place, the workmen started laying the tracks on top of and between them. There were two pipes, or rails, where the wheels would ride, and between them a third pipe, the spine, through which the track was connected to the support columns. The steel was thin around what would be the station area, where speeds and stress would be low, and much thicker at the base of the drops where the coaster would be coming through at high velocity.

These pieces of track were not just metal to Theo: they were individual miracles of precision engineering, tubular rails heated and bent and moulded, and beneath the smoothness of their surface he knew there would be strong and weak points equally unseen, places where forces both dynamic and static would gradually worry away the metal’s strength to the point of failure.

This was physics, invisible but ubiquitous, and it had fascinated Theo for as long as he could remember: that there is so much in life that we cannot see, and yet it governs everything we do. He would leave the operators with everything they needed to test for fatigue and to replace the track before anything catastrophic happened, but he would be long gone by the time they either did so or chose not to.

The welding torches threw off angry sparks. Theo inhaled the high scent of their burning as though it were frankincense, and listened to the cacophony of hammer on steel as rapt as an opera-goer. He walked each section when it was up, sure-footed like a mountain goat and unbothered by either the height or his lack of harness. There was no logical difference between walking along a surface six inches above ground and one sixty feet up. The first was so simple as not to require thought: the second was just a matter of controlling one’s mind enough to override the fear.

He heard Min gasp the first time he placed a ladder against a support column and went up it two rungs at a time, and he gave her an insouciant grin, which hid the quick thrill of knowing that she cared about him enough not to want to see him in danger.

He was, he realised, overriding a very different sort of fear.

‘Don’t worry,’ he called out. ‘I won’t fall.’

‘You’d better not.’ Her turn to grin. ‘Imagine the trouble I’ll be in if you do.’

He made a face. ‘And there was me thinking you cared.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

Slowly unfolding in front of someone he adored, open and almost reckless: ‘almost’ because Yun Seok was the only one there who could speak English and he wasn’t within earshot. There could have

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