The Low Quarter woke like a machine taking its first breath after a long night. Steam thickened in alleys and rose from grates, coiling around signs cut from brass and iron. Small lamps glowed through oily glass, throwing halos over stalls where vendors sold polished gears, cracked pressure gauges, coils of braided copper and jars of translucent solvent. Above all of it the Aurel Spire loomed—a needle of sheeted metal and ceramic that caught the early light and sent it back as a steady, almost domestic hum. That quiet vibration threaded through the Quarter the way a metronome sets time for a craftsman's hands: steady, unavoidable, a presence as familiar as a neighbor's cough.
Rowan Hale liked that hum in the mornings. It set a tempo for fingers used to fine tolerances. He preferred brass to speech and could coax a misaligned escapement to sing sweetly again with nothing more than a slip of file and the right touch of oil. His stall was a pocket of ordered chaos among the market's clutter—drawers of tiny screws, a jar of tempered springs, a rack of miniature cams and shutters. He had set up a low bench under a faded awning, and on it sat the present of a thousand little acts of patience: a small mechanical bird with stamped feathers, a feathered motor and an aether cell that pulsed at its heart. He had built it for Lina.
His hands moved over the sparrow's joints with a care that was almost religious. A strip of brass feather clicked into place; a spring that had behaved badly the night before now lay willing beneath his thumb. The sparrow's wings were polished to a dull glow; its eyes were tiny, seamed crystals that would catch sunlight and scatter it into prismatic points. Rowan could remember the first time Lina had laughed at one of his contraptions and how that sound had helped him forget the long evenings when there wasn't enough work to keep the bench lit.
People came by—fishermen from the docks, two municipal clerks arguing about new tariffs, a pair of apprentices who wanted a gear trimmed. Rowan charged small sums. He fixed what needed fixing and sometimes refused payment when he felt pity heavier than the worth of coins. That was how he lived: small repairs, small kindnesses, an economy of favors and the occasional barter of a repaired pocket chronometer for a warm meal. The Spire's steady song made the work feel less precarious; the city held itself up, and so his hands could keep on making.