Etta Varr set the last shim and listened. In the hush of her shop the coupling sang like a small animal, a low, precise pulse that matched the rhythm of the couple's breathing as she had promised. She held the brass half in her palm and felt its tiny heart through the pad of her thumb: a steady, engineered breath, warm as any living thing when tuned right. The old couple sat close on the cracked leather chair by the workbench, hands clasped together in the way years taught people to hold one another when the wind pulled on the eaves.
Etta had been at the bench since dawn. The shop smelled of oil and lemon peel, because she believed grease should be cleaned with something that tasted like the preserves her mother used to tuck into morning parcels. A tea vendor down on the street hawked steamed cogcakes—sugar pressed into shapes that looked like tiny gears—and the flour-sweet smoke rose up through the open skylight and braided with the sharp tang of coal. Brasswick's air was always working on two things at once: the economy of smoke and the economy of sound. Neither answered polite questions.
She tapped the coupling with a slender rod and the tone altered by a fraction. The old woman smiled, the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes folding like paper. 'Will we hear each other if the fog rides in tonight?' she asked.
'You will hear when your neighbor sighs and when he laughs,' Etta said, and adjusted the damper. 'You will not hear his thoughts, if that's what worries you. You only get what you craft into the joint.'
'How very modern of you,' the man said, and there was a dry little chuckle in it. He wore a cardigan stitched with small brass studs at the elbows; he admitted, later, that he kept a wick and a spare cog in one pocket at all times, more out of habit than need.
Etta smiled at that, sharp and brief. Her hands moved with a choreography of rivet, file, and palm: she unlatched a miniature gate, fed through a filament of tempered copper, set a leather shim so it softened the note, and crimped the retaining clip with the flat of her thumb. The coupling's voice folded into their breathing until it was impossible to tell which hum belonged to machine and which to chest. She wound a final thread of silver wire around the seam and kissed the tiny seam with her soldering iron. The smell of hot metal made the old man sneeze, then laugh; the laugh was an honest thing, so she let herself keep it.
'You make them like lutes,' the woman said, leaning forward. 'Not instruments. Lutes.'
'There is a difference,' Etta agreed, and, without meaning to sound poetic, added: 'Lutes are meant to be tuned by hand.'
It was a small joke, half private, and it landed between them as if it were a coin. The couple rose, thanked her, and carried the finished bond in a box lined with felt. They stepped out into the high street where the morning crowd unfolded like the bellows of a machine—steam barrows, hawkers, a boy on a sprung cart who played a brass horn that chirped the market's hour. Etta watched them go, fingers still smelling of flux and lemon, and felt the shop around her, alive with a dozen half-finished couplers and neatly coiled wires. A clockwork sparrow, one of her less reliable commission pieces, hopped from a shelf and peered at her with a tiny lens-eye like a jewel.
'You owe me grease for promising it to you,' she told the bird, and it bobbed as if offended. Her bird had a habit of stealing paper tickets from fabric vendors. Today it had a scrap of ribbon stuck to its tail.
There was a sound the shop gave that always made Etta listen: the background rumble of city lines, the network of anchors and spans and hollow pipes carrying gossip and weather and the city's small tensions. It was the city speaking in vibrations, and she had learned to tell when a pitch was right and when something was off-kilter. But the market's din took over the street; a demonstration in the square would begin in an hour and she could hear the murmur of it like a distant tide of tools.
She wiped her hands on her apron. The coupling in its felt box sat like a sleeping thing on the bench. Etta ran a thumb along its edge and then, because habit required it, locked the shop's little brass gate and stepped out into the lane. The air was full of the warmed scent of cogcake and the kettle-scent of street tea, and a boy juggled loose gears for pennies and called them stars. The day felt engineered to be useful and unembarrassed.
As she turned toward the square she saw a crowd gathered around a contraption that rolled on three iron feet and gleamed her kind of danger: the Auto-Binder. It looked like a chest of drawers attached to a caricature of a printing press, arms and no shame. A woman at the machine's helm was winding a crank. The crowd leaned in, ready to be impressed. Etta felt, for a moment, the same thin prickle she had felt when apprentices first learned to temper steel too hot: hope and worry in equal measure.