Corin Halver woke to the thin metallic rasp of a waking city where cloth did more than hang. It sighed and flexed around doorframes, hummed beneath bridge planks, and muttered through the quilts stretched over the baker's stalls. Morning in the quarter smelled of hot threadcakes and the sharp tang of pressed flax; a boy somewhere was boiling a pot of moth-leaves for tea, and the sound of needles like distant rain threaded the air. Corin swung his legs out from under a heavy blanket of patched linen, flexed his fingers against the rough palm of the wooden workbench and listened for irregularities: a loose hem made a different sound than a true tear. He could tell the city’s small ailments by ear. He set a kettle to the iron stand and, while the water began to breathe, ran a practiced thumb along the edge of the counter to find stray nap of cloth to clean the needles.
A brass thimble, heirloom and obnoxious, clicked its small tongue against the lamp. “You ought to oil the lamp before it glares at you like an accusing eye,” said Mr. Thimble in its pompous, squeaking voice. Corin snorted and lifted it. The thimble sat on his fingertip like a tiny, opinionated lord. Across the bench, a measuring tape coiled in a corner, grimacing in a way only a measuring tape could manage, and it made a wet, discontented sound as if it were complaining about its own inability to extend. “Len refuses to extend today,” Corin muttered, tapping the coiled canvas with his fingernail. “What’s wrong with you?”
Len answered in a thin, reedy voice that had a knack for melodrama. “I am on strike. No one notices the small things until their hems betray them.” It made a small, collapsing yawn. Corin grinned despite himself, fingers already moving. He threaded a needle with a practiced loop, the motion like a private prayer. The needle slid through the fabric, and he tugged—set a tacking stitch that held. He hummed a stitch-count under his breath, a rhythm that matched the kettle’s simmer and the distant calls of sellers arranging bolts of cloth. There was an economy to the city’s morning: bakers sold rag-breads glazed with honey from the cloth-flowers, seam-sellers stacked piles of discarded cuffs for lantern fuel, and children chased button-birds that hopped on threads. None of that was his concern, normally. Corin’s shop was a narrow room between a hatmaker and a man who sold spoons carved from unused bobbins. He liked the small sufficiency of it: a chair, a window that leaned toward the street, a shelf of tools whose weight he understood.
A sound like a frayed string tearing—sharp, animal—cut across the morning. Corin sat up, needle halfway between finger and palm. The kettle stopped boiling as if embarrassed. From the window came a shifting panic: a market cry that faltered, the thud of boots, the whine of fabric sucked like breath down a throat. He moved before he decided. Boots found the floorboards, hands yanking on a heavy coat. He shouldered open the door and the city’s seam-music hit him with more dissonance than usual. A stretch of Hem across the market had loosened and a cluster of stalls was buckling: a doorway had curled inward, the thresholds of a handful of shops yawning like tired mouths. A woman outside clutched a pole that supported a banner and swore at the air in a language of thread-spliers and curses. Corin felt the old, small tremor of obligation that had always come with skill. He should have ignored it—he could have shut the door and coaxed the kettle back to boil. Instead, he snagged his satchel, slid Mr. Thimble onto his thumb, and, as Len refused to extend when asked to measure for the strap, he tucked the coil under his arm and ran.