Aetherbound

Brasswell lay like a layered machine against the sky, each stratum a different kind of hunger. At the highest spires polished domes and glassed walkways drank steam from the sun; clockwork carriages sailed along tensile rails and the Commission's towers blinked with regulated light. Below them hung tiers of tenements with balconies of riveted sheet and pulley-suspended gardens that scraped soot. Far beneath all of that, where the ground tasted of iron and the rivers ran through ribs of cast pipe, the city exhaled all it could not sell. In that lower world Elara Quinn kept her hands busy. Her workbench was a crowded continent of copper fittings, wound springs, and a ragged atlas of scrap: gears with teeth ground into new teeth, valves mended with braided wire, a spare wing from an old courier flier soldered to a hydraulic hinge. She moved through these pieces like someone rebuilding a life from the parts of others. The shop smelled of hot oil, brass filings, and the faint sweet corrosion of aether residue that clung to certain old alloys. She preferred the close, metallic smell to the polished civility above. It felt honest.

Elara's hands were small but scarred with the geometry of labor; knuckles puckered with healed burns, fingertips nicked where she had sharpened cogs into new teeth. She had a knack for the invisible tolerances—where two surfaces ought to just kiss, where a spring should sit half a millimeter looser to take the shock without shivering loose its temper. People from the mezzanines came when something near the bottom stopped breathing: a water pump that coughed foam into its housing, a lift with a tired governor, a toy automaton with a bad memory. They brought coins stamped with the municipal crest, and if she was in a generous mood she put a little more truth into the fix than the payer had paid for.

Her brother's shadow sat at the edge of every repair. Jonah had been a machinist in the Commission factories until the accident that everyone had given him in official reports. In truth Elara still folded his face into her palms at night as if the skin could be smoothed back. She would tell herself, when a delicate cog fell into place under her wrench, that the universe had not yet lost all balances. Each successful mending was a promise she'd been making for years: find the thing that took him back, or build something that could bring him near enough to touch.