The market rose like a living machine, a sprawl of tarred awnings and steam-stained canvas stitched into the lower ribs of the city. Brass teeth glinted under coal smoke and sun, vendors hawked salvaged springs and bent plates, and little hoppers of compressed air darted between stalls in a nervous, determined choreography. Mara moved through the press like a careful chord, listening. She had always listened more to metal than to talk, letting the cadence of pistons and the sigh of vents set the shape of her day. The market sounded to her like a map that could be read without eyes: a low, steady thrum where a foundry tapped a pulse, a quick, staccato whine where a pocket engine was being coaxed back to life, a murmur that meant water pumps had begun their slow rotation beneath the street.
She kept her hands out of sight, knuckles stained with lubricant and the fossilized dust of gears. Her basket clinked with the scrap that made her wage: twisted flanges, a dented cover to a pressure regulator, a coil of copper that had once belonged to a carriage light. She was quick with a bartering smile and hard with her offer, not because she trusted the market so much as because she trusted the measures she took with her own hands. Most folk traded stories for coin; Mara traded proof — scratches, numbered stamps, testable wear. She had a way of cold-lamping a tiny gear and watching how the teeth fit together, reading a tool like a confession.
Above the market the Spire held its slow exhalation. The great column of the city watched everything from its crown of valves and observation domes, a column of burnished copper and latticed rafters that gathered weather and light the way a gramophone gathers sound. Everyone in the low streets watched its face at some point and turned the sight into superstition or policy. The Spire hummed with purpose in every rumor: it balanced the climate and tuned the public engines, it settled storms and loosened fog, and it demanded a punctual stationing of resources. People said it took what the city could spare and returned order. People also said that order was bought in strange, private auctions conducted with silence and brass tokens. Mara did not know which rumor was truer. She knew only that the Spire made a different kind of noise than the market.
It was not an ordinary morning. A procession had gathered near the square, a polite elbow of citizens and municipal officers that wrapped in a careful circumference around a low platform. The platform bore a mechanism that looked like the ribcage of some small, delicate beast: concentric coils and glass bulbs, a cage of brass pins. Men in the uniform of the Guild of Maintainers stood sentinel, their arms folded over the polished half-masks that betrayed them as the sort who could read technical manuals like scripture. A clockwork cart had wheeled in a box that clattered like a coffin full of small metal tubes. The crowd murmured with that stiff, careful sound of people who were allowed the sensation of participation but not the instruments of force.