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A comedic urban caper about Cass, a young elevator-fixer with grease on her hands and a knack for softening edges, who must retrieve the city's stolen kindness beacon. With a motley crew, a talking cat, an old engineer, and a coaxer that rewards sincerity, they restore warmth to a city flirting with efficiency.
Cass Butterworth had a specialty no one asked for and everyone secretly needed: she made elevators feel like people. Not in a creepy robot way, but with vinyl cushions the exact blush of late summer peaches, brass handrails that caught the melancholy light just right, a tiny shelf for grocery bags that never squeaked, and playlists that remembered whether you'd cried on Tuesdays. Her van—Big Blue, because she refused to name work vehicles anything sensible—was a shoebox of tools, half a poetry anthology, three mismatched socks, and a portable espresso maker that had been coaxed into life with duct tape and willpower.
On a Tuesday that smelled of rain and frying onions, Cass was crouched in the belly of Building 7B, knees pressed to the elevator's pulley in a way that might worry an orthopedist. Mrs. Pritchard, ninety-two and an enthusiast of scandal, sat on the landing with a bag of lemon cookies and an expression that said she'd suffered fools before and would again. Cass tightened a screw, fed a ribbon of insulation through a crevice, and hummed with the sort of careful focus that made the elevator lights steady.
"You put new bulbs in?" Mrs. Pritchard asked, voice like fine bone china.
"New bulbs, and a humidity filter," Cass said, wiping her hands on her jeans. The grease left convulsive little smack-marks like a child's signature. "I tuned the panel so it compliments people who look at themselves in the mirror. Tasteful, not creepy."
Mrs. Pritchard considered this. "Does it tell jokes?"
"Only haikus," Cass said. "They tend to be more polite."
A soft thud echoed through the shaft above them. Neither noticed at first—a city is always talking in knocks and sighs—but then a ripple of silence slid through the landing like someone had muted the world. Mrs. Pritchard’s hand, which had been busy sorting cookies, paused.
"Did you hear that?" she asked.
Cass leaned her head up the shaft and listened. The usual chorus of clanging trams and a distant saxophone had gone thin, like someone had zapped the saturation from the air. Her fingers left a bright grease trail on the rail as she stood. It was a small, absurd unease, the kind that made her want to check the fuse box of the city itself.