Aetherheart

Luminford’s skyline was a jagged tooth of copper and glass, a city of steam and rivets that sighed beneath a sky threaded with airships and the distant churn of turbines. Above, the ornate terraces of the Council glowed with polished brass and opaline panes, their fountains singing in measured bursts that kept the evening glittering. Below, the docks lay in a different weather: coal dust on brick, iron studs wet with salt and oil, and the perpetual gray wash of men and women who kept the city’s belly fed. The great Aetherheart, an engine the size of a cathedral, was said to beat somewhere in the metal bones under the civic plaza; its pulse was a rumor in the noisy streets and a certainty in the deep, steady vibrations that ran through pipe and paving alike.

Mara Halden’s shop was the kind of place that refused to be tidy. Narrow as a gondola and half hung with stained canvas, it clung to the side of a warehouse like a ship’s cabin. Shelves sagged under a miscellany of gears, spring coils, a jar of toothlike cogs, and the pale, braided tubing that clockmakers called sinew. Above a battered workbench, pegboard hooks held prosthetic fingers in various states: articulated, bulbous, glittered with copper filigree and lined with polished bone. The solder-stained lamp spilled yellow light across her hands; her hands were a different thing entirely. One was flesh and pale with the map of a burn scar; the other was her own construction — a careful armature of brass, leather, and cunning escapements. It clicked with familiar rhythms when she moved it, and she kept it oiled like a promise.

She had been fitting a wrist for a fisherman when the knock came. The visitor was a thin man in a coat patched at the shoulder, a herald of municipal business. He carried no glare of authority, only a bureaucratic chill: stamped slips, an officious tablet that whined with stamped demands. "Registry inspection," he announced, voice flat as a wrench. Mara set a finger to the leather elbow and forced a smile. The fisherman — old Tomas, a man who smelled of fish guts and sea wind — braced as papers were consulted. Shop licenses were a ritual; many tradesmen paid the tax of forms to stay open, but the Council’s auditors could be particular about how prostheses were cataloged. There had been whispers of raids when ration quotas shifted. People read those notices like weather forecasts; it meant frantic counting of parts, the hurried hiding of salvage, the muttered prayers for luck.

Mara’s ledger lay beneath a stack of grease-stained cloth. She pulled it out with a practiced motion, fingers quick with the lie of things. Old Tomas watched her hands as if they might hold the shape of future days. The inspector ran a scanner along the armrest and hummed. "Identification marks missing from two replacements," he said. His tone suggested a small, fixable omission. Mara felt the old tightening in her chest: the knowledge that checks were rarely small in theory and often costly in practice.

Outside, the harbor exhaled. Barges shuffled, and men tossed crates into the watery throat of the channel. A boy on the quay laughed, then coughed; the sound was a dry, startled thing. The inspector’s tablet clicked again, and he asked to inspect the prosthetic ledger more closely. "The Council requires traceable components for regulated limbs," he intoned. His eyes flicked over the room and stopped on a crate in the corner that had not belonged to Mara this morning. It had been left by a scuttled delivery — a shipment of scrap to be sorted when the tide left time. A smell like old sea and machine oil seeped from it.

Mara opened the crate while the inspector leafed through her book. Inside were lengths of braided tubing and a coil of fine brass, but tucked beneath them, half buried in wet burlap, something gleamed with a different, colder light. It took her a second to understand what she was seeing: a shard of metal and crystal, small as a fist, its brass casing etched with faint radial lines and its heart a pale crystal that seemed to drink the light and give it back in soft pulses. It was entirely incongruous to the rest of the salvage, as if someone had misplaced a fragment of a jewel among ship scrappings. The inspector straightened and peered.

"What's that?" he asked. He did not reach out. No one reached for things that might trouble a ledger-listing. Mara felt a sharp, private thrill: curiosity, dangerous and immediate. She lifted the shard on a scrap of oiled cloth and the crystal pulsed, once, in a rhythm that matched the far-off, familiar thrum of the city's machinery. She froze. Around them, the workshop’s sounds — the tick of a small escapement, the squeak of leather boots, the gulls overhead — seemed to shrink, funneling attention into the small object in her palms.