Smoke and Gears: The Final Performance

Dawn hadn’t bothered to dress itself properly before the Founders Day crowd arrived; it rolled in like a tired performer, half-done hair and a cup of cheap coffee pressed into its hand. Cass Rook liked mornings that started with work before the glare of an audience. He steered his battered box truck between stalls stacked with brass bread and spice-toasted buns, the air a sharp braid of caramelized sugar and machine oil. Merchant carts hawked coriander fritters called gear-buns, and somewhere a boy on the pier was practicing paper kites shaped like cogwheels, letting them sting the breeze like miniature sails. The festival’s colors were loud enough to bruise: streamers the hue of lacquered copper, banners stitched with clockwork sigils, and rows of food where people argued seriously about whether the spiced tea paired better with smoked eel or fried dough.

Cass parked in the service alley and threw down a ramp. He didn’t have assistants who wore suits; he had a wheezy automaton—Percival—that blinked a single glassy eye and smelled faintly of brass polish. Percival had been a prop for a decade: an oversized mechanical pigeon with a goose’s chest, a confetti bladder, and a honk that made toddlers howl with laughter. The thing waddled forward on spindly legs, balancing an extra spool of safety cable in its beak as if it had a purpose. It did not. That was the best part.

He started unloading trusses, counterweights, and the little black boxes of cams that had made his name: timing guts, not glamour. He dug a wrench from a crate and flexed his knuckles, checking teeth on sprockets, coaxing stuck pins free with the patient violence of someone who’d spent half his life making impossible things look easy. He loved the particular smell of freshly spun rope—damp hemp, faint algae from the harbor—and the way a rope would sing when it took a load. Everything told him in minute language whether the job would stand.

“Morning, Cass,” Niko Alvarez called from the gate, all grin and neon scarf, the city’s darling of glittering smoke and LED ribbons. He leaned against a rigging truck, feet tucked up as if gravity were merely an opinion. “You hauling antiques or a museum?”

Cass hooked the wrench into a bolt and didn’t quite look up. “Antiques that still win races,” he said. He pulled a pin and the sound was a small, clean percussion. “Besides, kids these days don’t know how to make a weight hold without an app.”

Niko laughed, the kind of laugh that helped the crowd like him for being young. “An app can’t do timing like throat muscles do. But hey—devices come and go, granddad. Let the LEDs have their day.”

Cass smiled around the edge of his sarcasm. Niko had been an apprentice once, then a foil, then a spark that burned too bright and too fast for Cass’s tastes. There was a tug of something softer—pride, annoyance—when he watched the younger man move with the lightweight authority of someone who’d learned to charm people before he learned to brace a truss. They had history the way old ropes had knot-memory: a record that tugged when pulled.

He set Percival on the center riser and checked the automaton’s winding mechanism. The little goose poked its beak at a spool, emitted a contented metallic chirp, and then, as if remembering an ancient joke, honked once with the volume of a trumpet and flung a spray of confetti into the air. A smear of sequins landed on Niko’s scarf. He blinked at Cass. Percival blinked back and made a noise like an apology.

Cass barked a laugh. “Laugh now. Wait until the crowd sees the cam work.”

The tech sheet for the main stage lay folded under a coil of cable. He smoothed it out, fingertip tracing the architecture of loads, the painted numbers where someone had notated where each block should sit. The ink on the right-hand column caught his eye—an annotation that didn’t match his own marks from the rewiring last season. A bracket detail was off, a plate called out that shouldn’t have been called out. He frowned, folded it back, and tucked it into his coat like a snake. He didn’t like loose ends.