Under the Clockwork Sky

Aster’s Fold smelled of metal and rain that never quite reached the soil. Winds scraped the hulls of sleeping freighters, and the settlement’s clocks — the proud, battered, municipal chronometers bolted to the market pylons — hiccupped like old engines. For a few heartbeats the little world folded in on itself: children froze mid‑laugh over scooped ice, a baker’s loaves ripened past prime in the space of one breath, and the old woman who kept the nets for cometcarters lost five years from her hands in morse‑rapid ticks. The phenomena had a habit of announcing themselves in the smallest cruelties before anyone could call them by name.

Arin Kestrel was watching a caravan of salvagers rewire a derelict shuttle when the street’s air filled with the galvanized twinge he’d learned to dread: harmonic feedback that rose and fell like a throat being cleared. He tightened his fingers on the wreck’s corroded rail and felt his pulse sync to its cadence. The sound was small, but it carried a pattern he had once loved and then ruined. He had been a Horologe engineer before the failure that had shattered timetables and hearts; before Mira slipped sideways and left him with a fault line he could not repair.

He had left that life to keep distance from the mechanisms that hurt people. Salvage was tidy in comparison: the copper and the bolts could not betray memory. Yet the signal that arrived now could not be ignored. It arrived as the kind of whisper only dusty, older receivers heard — a coded distress that had been relayed through a dozen unregistered ears before reaching him: a Halt Node failing two burrows out, a resonator core collapsing its phase field and bleeding irregular harmonics into the local time stream. The message was simple and terrifying; the Horologe architecture was not supposed to fail like this.

He felt the old pull in his ribs. Guilt, as dense as ballast. Mira’s face crossed his mind — the way she used to laugh when the clocks all chimed together, the way she sang numbers like lullabies. He had told himself he would not look back. He had told himself he could keep others safe by staying away. The distress call shredded that resolve. The little anomalies were getting sharper. Someone would die if the Halt Node collapsed wholly. He had been trained to listen to such collapses, to pull at wires and coax harmony back out of noise. The choice arrived with an imperative in its belly: move or watch Aster’s Fold become a fast‑rotting bruise in space.