Mechanics of Reunion

The depot at midnight was not so much a place as an argument about fidelity. Brass and steel holding the city in vertical patience, coiled ropes like stubborn promises; a row of maintenance lamps threw a yellow net over benches where wrenches sat like waiting dogs. Cass worked in that net the way some people prayed — fingers moving while thoughts wandered like loose bolts. He lubed bearings, checked the slack on compensator chains, listened for the micro-sighs a healthy governor made when it settled into its rhythm. The machines tolerated bluntness; they rewarded attention.

Outside the depot the city was stacked in bands, floors like shelves in an enormous, practical library where people shelved their lives by distance rather than subject. Evening neon striped the tiers in alternating cadences; merchants on the lower arcs sold thumb-sized fritters that tasted of fermented skyfruit and flattened seaweed, and the scent threaded up through shaft openings to the depot, where it sometimes made Cass impatient for a meal that could be eaten with one hand between bolts. High terraces hung kelp-lanterns on anniversaries and birthdays, and the lanterns swayed as if the whole city smiled at a private joke.

He preferred the company of a stubborn flange to small talk, not because he despised voices but because bolts did not expect you to come into their privacy. Once, when a neighbor had asked whether his work was lonely, Cass had shrugged and said, "The cars keep better hours than I do." The neighbor laughed like a kettle; somewhere in the shaft a loose tin answered with a clank that sounded suspiciously like agreement. Humor was small and necessary: a spoon nailed above the coffee tin as a talisman against bad jams, an old poster that declared in cheerful block letters that the depot’s espresso tasted better after an overhaul.

A soft chirp from the terminal broke the ritual. Service alert: Shaft Seven — stalled car. Cass's gloved fingers closed on a ratchet before his thoughts finished cataloguing contingencies. He thumbed the console with practiced speed and watched the manifest bloom on the screen. Routine, he told himself. Routine that could become urgent if people were trapped, wet if the weather pushed up from the lower tiers. He slid his tools into their loops, shouldered the leather kit he kept for night rounds, and felt that familiar tug at the small of his spine: the city asking for hands.