Gearsong over Brassford

Steam kissed the rooftops of Brassford as the first pale wash of morning stroked copper gutters and iron chimneys. Elara Prynn stood on the tarred boards of her building, her boots planted among coils of tubing and a scatter of brass washers. She cradled a hand-sized pressure gauge like a sparrow, turning a tiny wheel until the needle steadied at a narrow, stubborn mark. The gauge trembled anyway. A faint wheeze rose from the city below, a groan that always came before the mills woke. Today the sound skipped, breaking the rhythm the way a fiddler’s bow snags on a frayed horsehair.

Across the street the bakery puffed sugar steam. The scent drifted up, warm and sweet, and tangled with hot metal and the tang of coal. Pigeons hopped along the parapet, tilting their heads at the brass vines Elara had bolted to the wall as a trellis for tools. She tucked a strand of hair behind one ear, leaving a smear of graphite along her cheekbone.

“Hold,” she whispered to the gauge, as if patience could steady metal. “Hold for me.”

The needle stuttered and slid. A puff valve on her homemade water-heater snapped and rattled. A cap came loose and pinged off the roof. Elara lunged and caught it with one hand, the way a seamstress snatches a falling pin. The heater gave a resentful cough.

From below, her grandmother’s cane tapped once on the stair. “Elara! Don’t you dare boil the tea dry,” Magda called, her voice brisk as a hand drum. “It tastes like soot when you do, and then I look at you with my eyes and you say, ‘I was testing a theory, Gran,’ and I still drink it.”

Elara grinned and bolted the cap. “Tea is safe! Theory also safe!” Her grin faded as the city’s shudder came again, this time a little deeper. The big engine at the heart of Brassford—the one everyone called the Crown—had always hummed like a cat pressed to a ribcage. Today it sounded like a cat with a burr caught in its paw. She wiped her hands on her apron and grabbed her satchel.

Down the stairwell, the old brick smelled like rain even when the sky was clear. Pipes ran beside the banister, sweating. Magda waited on the landing in a chair with iron wheels that Elara had tuned so many times she could do it with her eyes closed. Magda’s hair was a silver halo under a scarf; she had the sort of gaze that could thread a needle in a breeze.

“City doesn’t feel right,” Elara said. The floor planks ticked as heat crept through the building.

Magda looked toward the east, where the mooring towers rose like organ pipes against the pale. “Engines are like people. They get moods when they’re overworked and underloved. Eat before you fuss with them.”