The Aetherheart of Gearhaven

Gearhaven smelled of rain and oil. The scent clung to hair and cloth and settled into the bones of the city like memory. Brass spines and glass lungs rose from the riverbank, scaffolds and skyways knitting districts into a single, wheezing organism. Steam stitched the seams between roofs; whistles sighed at dusk and the city answered with a chorus of clicking regulators and the measured sigh of the Aetherheart at its center.

Juniper Vale kept time by those sighs. She measured herself against the beat of the engine as if it were a metronome for courage. At twenty-two she had hands still quick enough for wirework and patient enough for pinion teeth. Her bench in the Kettlework Quarter was a pocket of ordered chaos: files in neat rows, anvils polished to fingerprints, drawers labeled with her father's neat, slanted hand. A brass sparrow, half-wired and unblinking, rested on a ragged cushion; near it lay a thin cog engraved with a small, imperfect spiral that Juniper traced with the pad of her thumb when the workshop hummed too loud.

Marla, who had run the morning shifts since Juniper could reach the vise, tipped a kettle of cooling oil and wiped her palms on an apron that knew more soot than soap. She smelled of cloves and smoke.

— Keep steady, Juniper, don’t let the tuner wander, — she said, voice low against the thrum.

Juniper nodded, fingers moving in a practiced blur. The new wing-strakes for a courier sloop demanded pinion alignment to the hundredth of a tooth; a mistake would make the craft sing and shatter in wind. Her mind, however, kept folding back to the center of the city where the Aetherheart pulsed like a great, brass ribcage. It had been a year since the gearquake took her father, since Rowan Vale walked into the engine's glasshouse with a satchel of blueprints and did not walk back out. The guild had called it an accident; the city called it a mystery.

Outside the workshop window, the bell at the Heart chimed noon. The sound traveled through a lattice of gutters and pipes, up to the alleys and down to the subways where coal and men kept their own time. Juniper felt that bell in her chest as much as in her ears and tightened the last screw on the sparrow. When she finished, she let the tiny wings open and the bird gave a single, ragged beat. It was imperfect but alive. She slipped the engraved cog into her pocket as if it were a talisman, as if the spiral might unspool an answer.