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In smoke-dark Cinderford, Evelyn Thorne rigs Ambrose Hale’s Alabaster Engine to reverse a trade in stolen recollections. As she becomes the living key to a mass restoration, the Conservatory’s polished cruelty unravels into public exposure, mechanical collapse, and the wrenching cost of memory redistributed.
The city of Cinderford never pretended to be gentle. Its spires were stitched with scaffolding and belled with steam; its canals ran with the shimmer of oily rain; the low sky was a permanent cowl, the color of old brass, through which the airships moored like slow, patient beasts. Evelyn Thorne stood on the threshold of Ambrose Hale’s workshop with the straps of her prosthetic hand tight against her wrist, the brass knuckles warming against skin that had not yet learned to trust metal as companion. The door sagged on its hinges. A copper plaque—Hale & Son, Applied Mnemonics—had been split by a crowbar and hung crooked, the letters dented as though someone had tried to pry the name from the world.
Smoke and sawdust met her. The first room was a landscape of overturned benches and scattering gears, coils of aether tubing cut and knotted on the floor. Shelves that once held careful rows of glass vials and labeled cogs had been tipped; a notebook lay open beneath a fallen lamp, its pages smeared with soot. Evelyn moved through the wreckage with fingers that remembered the shape of this place more than her feet did. She had spent half her life in this dust and noise—wiring fragile circuits into stubborn brass until late hours, teaching herself to translate Ambrose’s eccentric scrawl into working schematics.
Now all of it was chaos and silence.
She found the engine in the middle room, half assembled on its broad iron stand. Even incomplete it was a thing that drew the eye: a ribcage of filigreed pipes and a heart of cerulean crystal that pulsed faintly as though it kept time with a far-away throat. The Alabaster Engine’s framework was unmistakable—Ambrose’s signature curvature and the unusual blend of aether latticework he had coaxed into humming at low wattage. Someone had tried, and failed, to move it. Scrape marks marred one iron bracket; a clamp had been pried off and abandoned like a broken limb.
A brass-encased cylinder lay at Ambrose’s workbench, small and weighty. Evelyn picked it up and felt a tremor run through the metal into her fingers; someone, in the night, had turned on a current and left a piece of stored work waiting like a wound. She set the cylinder to her ear. No sound came but the hum of the place itself. When she tapped the side with a knuckle, a lock clicked in a remote part of the room—there was a hidden latch, she realized, hidden from anyone who would only glance. Ambrose had always been secretive in the ways that mattered most.