POV: wax
Summary
Wax spends the afternoon flinging himself across Elendel with his son strapped to his back, Max hollering for each leap to go higher and faster. Wax had been a solemn child and a solemner adult, but the boy's glee is infectious; the controlled detonation of speed at the start of a Push and the held breath at the apex are not, in his experience, available any other way and survivable.
A Malwish vessel floats into the airspace far off, a slow toy of wood and fans suspended by ettmetal devices. From up here the city's octant divisions are visible as long straight lines along the major roadways; the slums press into themselves and the manor grounds spread apart from each other; he can read the shape of his neighbourhoods all at once. Once he would have assumed this perspective was a Coinshot's private privilege. The Malwish airships have shown him otherwise. And still — this is his city. His. Returned to and now, somewhere along the way, loved.
He bounces them in toward Ahlstrom Tower using the skyscrapers around it as inward anchors — the reason he picked the building was that it sits close enough to its neighbours for the trick to keep working all the way up — and lands not at the penthouse but on the rooftop platform built for window-cleaners. Max unclips from his back but stays tethered by a strong cord Steris designed and is therefore not worried about. The boy produces a pouch of twirly-seeds and starts dropping them, watching them spin down toward the cars honking on the streets so far below that no horse-drawn carriage still moves among them. Six years home and progress through Elendel is a wrecking ball; you move with it or you become rubble.
The platform faces north. Hammondar Bay glints off to his left, and to the right is the Roughs — wonder and mystery and a life he loved. He looks for the old ache, and finds something has changed. Today the country is somewhere he remembers fondly and does not want back. He has a life here he loves at least as much. More, maybe, judging by the warmth that comes up through his chest as Max laughs. *Finally,* he thinks. *I've finally stopped grieving.* He scoops the boy up for a hug he is too wiggly to tolerate for long, and they switch to a game Max invented a few months ago: a wicker ball with a metal weight at the centre, hurled into the air, Wax Pushing it onto a chosen neighbour's roof from below, the two of them then leaping after it together. Max keeps trying to throw the ball flat, complaining that if he throws it up it will come down on their heads; Wax explains, again, that the higher the throw the further Wax can land it, and is rewarded with successively higher launches. He wonders briefly what the windows of the office towers think of the senator and his five-year-old shooting past at speed.
He can only stretch the game for so long before the airship comes back to him. The Malwish vessel he had mistaken for a trader earlier is closer now, and it is not a trader. It is a warship — a fortress in the sky moved by giant fans, larger than any cabin a hot-air or helium experiment in the Basin could hope to lift, and it is approaching low and slow and visible on purpose. A statement, not a threat. He straps Max back into the harness and Pushes off the roof toward it, climbing toward the ship to find out what statement they are choosing to make today.