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In a near-future city where hours are traded and memories commodified, a young clockmaker named Rowan seeks a missing face. He uncovers a brass mnemonic device, confronts a corporate Exchange, and pays a personal price to restore a life—learning how memory, identity, and time are bound by delicate economies.
Rowan learned to hear his life in ticks. Mornings began with a chorus of mechanisms that settled into a thin harmony: grandfather clocks that had once dominated the storefront across the lane, pocket watches sealed in velvet, a radio that preferred to murmur weather to a row of brass gears. He had lived in the back room of the shop since he was nineteen, under a skylight that cupped winter light like a palm. Oil and metal had a memory; they smelled of small repairs and stories. When he woke, he always knew the hour by the chill in his fingers and the way the light split at the hinge of his workbench.
That morning, a silence sat heavier than usual in the shop. A wall of clocks ticked without synchronization, and one of them skipped, not the time but a beat, as if a pulse had been taken from the whole room and kept somewhere else. Rowan ran his thumb along the smooth curve of a case, feeling grooves that had recorded hands and hesitations, and for a moment he could not name the person whose photograph lay beneath the magnifying glass. The image was there in his memory as if painted out: the outline of a face, the slope of a forehead, a laugh the shop kept in spite of everything, but whenever he reached for the name, his hands closed on cold air.
He set the photograph down gently, as if careful handling might restore ink. The clock above the door chimed—seven strikes, small and indifferent. Outside, the street vibrated with early commuters. People traded minutes in kiosks, eyes hollow with calculation. Rowan had always been careful with time in the literal sense; his wages came in hours clipped from his shift, saved in a tin beneath a coil of spring. He had not learned to barter away memory for minutes.
A knock at the shop door snapped him into the present. Mara, his neighbor from the grocer's flat across the lane, slipped inside with a parcel under her arm. She smelled of bread and rain. "You look like you misplaced something," she said without pleasantries, the way people do when they have watched you forget a familiar route.