The Bloom in the Iron Sky

Iris Vale kept her hands like other people kept memories: pressed into the grooves of metal and oil, rubbed raw until the pattern of wires and rivets read like the lines on her palm. Morning on the Northspine Perch arrived not with sunbathed streets but with a hush — the slow uncoiling of wind through broken glass and the clink of copper against copper as neighbors tuned their condensers. She stood on the rusted lip of a rooftop garden that a dozen fingers and a dozen lonely tools had coaxed out of a gutter. Below, the city was a stacked maze of sleeping machines and skeletal signs, towers leaning like tired sentries against an iron sky. The air tasted metallic; when she breathed it her throat tightened as if remembering salt. Tock sat two feet from her, a patchwork dog of bent panels and a single, compass-bright eye. Its tail was a coiled spring that gave when she stroked it. Tock whined — a tiny vibration through a loose plate — and nudged the socket of a cracked condenser with its muzzle. She smiled without looking. It was the smallest thing that made the place feel like a home: a machine that accepted the small human kindness she could give without asking for much in return. Around her the Perch woke. A woman farther down the ledge unfurled a strip of fabric to shade a trough. A child, knobby-kneed and still hair-raw from sleep, clambered atop a water tank and hit a dent in rhythm like a drum, calling out a counting rhyme the way people used rhythm to keep sane in the absence of clocks. In the distance, a bell — a bell that no longer rang true — suggested the presence of the council. Iris listened for its twice-told note and felt the small, familiar ache in her ribs. The condensers were her trade. She kept them from seizing, learned their murmurs the way others read faces. She could tell, with a fingertip, when a valve wanted to scream and when it would hold. Today she bent to the nearest unit and traced the copper like reading a sentence. The fan teeth were chipped; the condenser hummed an anxious octave. She tightened a brace, tonged a braided wire, and let a measured breath out when the tremor softened. Tock barked once, quick and pleased. A sound came up from below: someone banging on an old pipe in the communal stair, a rough percussion counting off worry. In a city that bartered and borrowed everything, the daily maintenance of clanking and welding and the ritual of sharing tea in dented cups had become a religion. Iris had been born into it and learned to move according to its rites. She had also learned what happened when it failed.