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In a vertical steampunk city, young mechanic Aurelia Finch must clear her father's name after the Lattice—the network of air currents that keeps the city aloft—is sabotaged. With a clockwork fox and a band of unlikely allies, she uncovers a corporate plot and restores the city's balance.
Aurelia Finch worked with her fingers first and her temper second. Her bench smelled of burnt oil, solder, and the faint metallic sweetness of old brass; the air in the workshop always tasted like the underside of an airship—oily, windy, and somehow alive. Brasshaven clung to the vertical seam of the river gorge like a stack of gears, each district a cog turned by steam and pulley. From her window she could see the great lattice of pipes and suspended trams that stitched the city to the sky, the Lattice—a web of pipes and wind-engines whose regulated currents kept the airships drifting safe and the towers from lurching into the fog.
She set a tiny balance spring into a pocket altimeter the size of a coin. The spring had been bent in a dozen microscopic places; repairing it required patience, a magnifier, and a steady thumb. Her hands moved in small choreography, fingertips blackened with grease, a freckled knuckle knocking against a tiny filing rasp. In the shop, clocks ticked in three different rhythms—one old regulator sang like a grandfather, a soot-crusted timer snapped like a metronome, and an experimental aetherometer hummed with a thin, high note that made her teeth vibrate.
‘‘You will burn that hairpin if you don't watch it, Auri,’’ said Hara Lin from the doorway, wiping smoke from her sleeve. Hara's smile was like the flick of a metal scarf—practical and quick. She worked at the Seamwright across the alley mending leather bellows and air-helmets; she kept more gossip than thread in her sewing kit.
Aurelia glanced up. ‘‘It’s on its last life, Hara. If I can just coax it back—’’
‘‘You coax things back all right. You coax my best collars into pink rags and call it art.’’ Hara leaned close, the scent of steam and patch glue clinging to her. Outside, the city breathed—hisses of steam, the heavy beat of a distant hammer, the soft, irregular clack of a tram slipping its line.
The morning light that filtered through the skylight was oily and yellow; it drew dust into gold. On the shelf behind Aurelia's bench sat a dozen maps—her father's large, drawn with meticulous inked lines, annotated with notes in a hand that had learned to love crooked edges. Raff Finch's maps were worn, their corners folded into a thousand small creases where fingers had followed routes he never flew. He had always said the Lattice wrote the city like a score, and if one missed a bar the music grew sour.
A sound cut into the rhythm of the shop: not the usual groan of brass or the rattle of tram chains but a long metallic moan from the direction of the Lattice. The altimeter on Aurelia's bench trembled against its pad. Hara's smile fell away. Outside, the light in the street faltered, then went out like a breath snuffed by a glove.