Leah Little

EVERY SOLDIER HAS AN ELEMENT. JAY HAS A SECRET. When Jay's eyes turn silver in a fight, there's no hiding it: wings flared, roots and rubble at her feet. Not from the air elemental boy who used to know her. Not from the soldier standing between her and freedom. Her shaping gives it away - the ability to manipulate light, not water, air, earth, or fire. Tawn's shaping gives him away just as fast, if anyone is paying attention: sound, bent and manipulated as he wishes. Jay grieved him years ago. She mourned, moved on without him, and built a life with no room left for a ghost. And here he is, alive, fighting, standing in front of her in a uniform that means he should be trying to kill her. When a fight she can't walk away from drags her lightshaping into the open, Jay is pulled into the center of something bigger and darker than a simple border skirmish. Cinder won't leave her side. Tawn won't stop bleeding for her. And the enemy closing in on Jay wants her power a lot more than they want her alive. Jay never asked to become a weapon. But she's about to find out exactly what a weapon is capable of.

Rapid engineering sketches are a fast way to iterate on a design. These are detailed, intricate drawings using standard engineering notation to communicate complex geometry as clearly as a CAD model, in a fraction of the time. That speed makes it possible to explore multiple options, catch problems early, and allow a team to interactively collaborate, resulting in more thoroughly developed designs.

The examples below are pulled directly from real trade studies and brainstorming sessions for AETHER and DBF.

AETHER Spectrometry Pipe V2, exploring an inner reflective coating and RGBW light ring for the spectrometry housing - before spectrometry was ultimately cut from final testing. A trade study comparing two AETHER testing setup housings, sketched during a team discussion on a whiteboard alongside the potentiostat wiring and gas flow paths. One of several iterations refining AETHER's final cell cross-section, sketched to test and communicate the geometry before modeling it in CAD. A DBF banner deployment mechanism concept: mounted to the aircraft's underbelly, releasing to pivot freely outward and deploy the rolled banner mid-flight.