The city woke each morning not with birdsong but with a cadence: a low, living thrum that threaded the streets and climbed the facades of brass and glass like breath. Copper ribs and riveted girders flexed with it; curtains trembled in tenements three stories up from where operators tended pressure valves; steam that smelled faintly of ozone and old coal slipped from vents in a steady, comforting hush. Juniper Vale had come to understand that hum as intimately as the creak in her left knuckle. It told her how the morning would behave. It told her who had worked through the night and who had left the feedbooks to drain. It kept time for people who could not afford clocks.
She was kneeling before a public pump in the eastern quarter, sleeves rolled to the elbow, face spattered with grit and a black smudge above one eyebrow, when the first stutter came. It was not at first audible over the chorus of the city's waking machinery; it was a shear in the rhythm, a hiccup in a metronome. The pump took a gasping lurch, then resumed with a hiccuping wheeze. Juniper's spanner, mid-turn, caught and she felt it there—an arrhythmia. She wiped her palms on her trousers and pressed her ear to the pump's brass belly as one might listen for a heartbeat.
Around her, merchants muttered. A child dropped her basket of small gears. A brewer cursed a stallion that balked when the trough slowed and the sky seemed to dim incrementally as arc fixtures stuttered in sequence. The hum faltered in the distance and came back thin, like a breath drawn through a too-tight throat. This sort of thing had happened before—faulty regulators, clogged conduits; Juniper had patched her share—but it always tasted different depending on what else it took with it. Today it stole the sharp click of delivery automatons and made the public brassworks cough.
She set the spanner down and felt the weight of other attention. Men in the heavier coats that belonged to the Foundry's field agents moved along the street like dark fish in the current, stopping to make notes on a slate, watching valves and grilles with more interest than the vendors they passed. Juniper had seen them before: efficient smiles and a kind of polite menace that suggested the city could be rearranged if inconvenient. She finished the pump with three precise twists and a soft application of a wire spring she had forged herself, coaxing the rhythm back. The pump sighed, obedient. People murmured thanks and the child collected her gears.