He found the fan in a lot behind a shuttered mill.
It was an industrial thing, taller than he was, a cage of steel with six blades inside it the color of old coins. Twelve hundred dollars, which was six weeks of nights. He walked it home on a rented hand truck through the rain, canted back over his shoulder at an angle that was frankly too much for him, and he did not tell anyone, because there was no one to tell. The group chat had gone quiet in the spring, the way those things do, without anybody deciding.
He rebuilt it in the shed. He wound the coils himself. He read until his eyes hurt about static pressure and blade pitch and the difference between the wind a thing makes and the wind a thing moves, and then he went to school, and then he came back and read some more.
And here Chima had a thought that his father never had, and his father’s father never had, and Isaac Greaves would not have understood if you had drawn it for him in the dirt:
The breath was never the point. The breath was only the delivery.
His whole line had spent four hundred years training a body. Not one of them had thought to build a machine.
And he was never going to have the lungs. He had known that since he was eleven.