The city had a voice and it was mechanical. From the riverfront to the smokestacks that crowned the merchant quarter, a slow, majestic cadence rose and fell like a sleeping thing breathing beneath iron ribs. People learned to live around that pulse: merchants timed their openings to its inhalations, watchmakers tuned escapements to its rhythm, children counted heartbeats as a game before sleep. They called the apparatus at the center the Cogheart, and to some it was a miracle of order. To others it was a law.
Evelyn Hale had been born with the sound in her bones. Her earliest memories were of copper filings glittering against a palm, of a small glove smeared with grease as a hand reached into a contraption to coax a reluctant spring. Her father’s bench sat where the light sliced through a narrow skylight in the back of their tenement workshop. Tools hung in a tidy half-circle above the wood scarred by a hundred anonymous repairs; a small stamping iron bore the family mark, an angular sigil of a crescent and gear. That stamp meant something in the lower quarter: a maker’s assurance. It was also a private relic, the last thing Thane Hale had pressed into metal before he left for the spire and never came home.
Evelyn’s life was a rotation of fixings: watches with teeth worn thin by time, brass toys whose laughter had stiffened in storage, pumps with valves jammed by river grit. She patched, polished, wound and welded in a workshop that smelled of coal smoke and oil and old paper; she mended the city’s small failures because that was what kept the rent paid and the apprentice’s bell ringing. People came with requests and left with objects that clicked and spooled and resumed ordinary usefulness. The work was honest, the wages meager, and the conversation thin. Most evenings, she stoked the coal, shaded a lamp and listened to her neighbors list items off of a day they could no longer remember with any color. Their faces had softened into a sameness she could not name; once-lively gestures had been sanded to routine. She thought of the children who used to splash in the canal and sing strange little songs, and the way a neighbor’s sketchbook now collected blank pages instead of the crosshatched studies it had once filled.
The Cogheart’s influence was not merely industrial. Brass ducts fed climate regulators that kept winter gentler for children and watering engines that coaxed vegetables from municipal plots. Steam channels drove pumps that lifted clean water for hospitals and factories. When the rhythm stuttered the city felt it like a fever. The machine was not merely power; it had become a promise of continuity, whispered by the men who tended it with white gloves and ledgered lists. Evelyn had no love of promises made out of fear; she had learned, on a smaller scale, how brittle peace could be when built from things that never asked for forgiveness.
On days when the work slowed, she wandered through the market alleys under the ribbed awnings, fingers brushing the curved edges of contraptions she could not afford. She watched the children trade tin figures in games that simulated airship battles and coal riots, but she always kept an eye on the scrap yards where obsolete automata came to die. Those yards were cathedral-busy with hands that could take apart a manmade thing and make it talk again, at least for an hour. Evelyn had made a trade with that place for years: a salvaged gear for a crust of bread, a corroded cylinder for a spool of brass wire. It was there, amid the hiss of torches and the bright, improvised music of tappers and welders, that she found the small thing that made her heart catch—a child-sized automaton folded into a heap like a discarded cousin.