Kade kept one hand in the world of soft metals and the other in the world of other people's faces. Around midnight the shop smelled of solder and jasmine tea, of ozone from low-power etching and of the cheap incense Stella the vendor on the corner burned when she was feeling theatrical. The sign above the door had been hand-painted in a style Kade liked to call apologetic: small serif letters that read, with a smirk, "Affect Engineering — Warranty does not cover feelings." People laughed at it when they glanced in; most of them needed something that made them worth laughing with.
The workbench was a landscape of tiny mountains: coils, ceramic beads, a spool of copper wire that had once been used as a bracelet by someone with better nights. Kade's right thumb bore a crescent scar from a mornings-early job where a client insisted on a live-demo and then sneezed midway. On the shelf above the bench sat a battered mandoline and a stack of the city’s evening newspapers folded to the comic strip. Kade favored tools that answered to touch. A soldering iron will not flatter you or demand apologies; it listens and reforms metal the way careful people keep secrets.
Outside, the rain moved in a municipal rhythm. It didn't fall so much as sigh and kiss the neon, leaving the air metallic and a little sweet — the kind of rain that had convinced the city's algae vendors that seasoning would do better than salt. Stella had a cart two blocks over that sold steamy algae bao with fermented tofu that made hungry engineers weep for nourishment rather than catharsis. The city had rituals. People queued for the bao like they queued for bandages. Kade had eaten a bao once after a twelve-hour recalibration binge and sworn never to make vows while hungry again.
Rafi had brought in a thermos of that tea earlier, and Kade had pretended to be offended when Rafi labeled the stash "romance brew," because of course romance had a recipe now — dried lemon peel, something alive and bitter, and a pinch of synthetically fermented cardamom. Rafi believed heart-repair announcements would be made with ribbons and discount codes someday. Kade believed bicycles better than promises.
A customer slid a gloved hand into the doorway: a commuter whose daily patch had drifted into a performance loop. He needed a smoothing; not the blunted kind that erased a week, but a fine tune so his laugh stopped cracking like a faulty speaker. Kade set the iron down, wiped hands on a rag, and reached for the microdriver. At the counter the commuter told a joke he did not feel; Kade threaded a needle of code into the patch and felt, jaggedly, the human warmth of someone trying to be braver than they were. The laugh fixed. The commuter left with a paper bag and a lighter step.
Nobody came to Kade for miracles. They came for less dangerous things: edges filed, tones tuned, the small mercy of not being a public hazard. But the night was young, and the city's peculiarities were stacked like plates: a drone had just late-broadcast an advertisement for a new municipal music tax that ensured buskers got royalties; someone downstairs had fixed the hallway lights with fluorescent fish that blinked like punctuation. The shop hummed. Kade leaned into the bench, flexed fingers that had spent years practicing micro-precision, and wondered what would disturb the rhythm tonight.