Etta Voss kept her life in toolboxes and tidy tangles of wire. Her hands remembered the feel of a seized drum the way other people could recall a lover’s voice: the grip of rust, the step of teeth that should mesh but refused. She had a low counter shelf where she oiled small parts and a kettle that hissed like a tired animal when it boiled. Outside, the city sighed in gusts that scraped dust from the higher galleries and flung it like confetti into alleys; someone had strung a row of battered prayer flags along the servicing walkway and they flapped like nervous teeth. The wind had a taste this morning — a faint sourness from the ferment houses on the deck below, and the air carried the tang of a stew someone had left on a radiator to simmer. It was not the kind of weather that invited sentiment, and Etta was not in the habit of it anyway.
She was in the middle of a stubborn job: coaxing a governor to stop chattering when a sharp knocking came at her steel door. The knock had the rhythm of a hand impatient with promise, not of a machine asking for mercy. She wiped oil from her palms on a rag that had more history than a lot of people's birthdays and unlocked the latch. Jonah Arlen stood in the corridor, rain pulling his hair into spikes, clutching a paper cone of steaming something that smelled suspiciously of spice and good intentions.
’You still open for absurd emergencies?’ he asked, grinning with the wet of the storm on his lashes. He always carried humor like a wet blanket — useless for warmth but comforting to toss at someone.
’Only for those that pay,’ Etta returned, and though she said it half-joking, her eyes slid to the ragged patch on his sleeve. He had the sort of look that made you want to slap sense into him and then hand him a wrench.
’Then you’ll take this one on sympathy,’ Jonah said, thrusting the cone at her. ’Stuck cabin at the east shaft, mid-level. Kid inside. Storm's got the gutters singing funny songs; the cables are playing along.’
The mention of a child had the effect of a dropped socket on metal. Etta felt the same small sharp thing — not fear, not yet, but a muscle that tightened out of habit. She grabbed her pack: a ratchet, spare friction pads, a coil of temp rope, a pry bar with a nick that had earned its own name.
’Show me,’ she said, and her voice was the kind that made Jonah put down the cone carefully, like it was something fragile. He knew she would rather be mending governors in silence than talking to people, but he also knew the city’s wires always spoke in half-truths. He jostled his chin toward the east shaft, and together they moved out into the wet, where the flags slapped and the stew scent clung to the air like a promise someone had left undecided.