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In a soot-stained steampunk metropolis, cartographer-inventor Iris Vane races to recover fragments of the stolen Meridian Key. With a clockwork raven, an old captain, and a ragged crew, she confronts a power-hungry councilor to restore her city's balance and reshape its future.
Iris Vane woke to the city already speaking. Meridian City inhaled through a million vented lungs: trains wheezed, anemometer arms clicked, the long coils of the Great Pipe exhaled steam smelling of copper and molasses. From the workshop window a braid of airships hung like bruised moons against pale dawn, brass ribs catching light and throwing patterns across leaning spires. She sat on the narrow stool, felt the clockwork hum through the floor, and, with the hand that remembered her father's touch, reached for the sextant at the bench.
The sextant was not ordinary; Iris had filigreed the brass with a thief's patience and a mapmaker's temper. Where seafarers read constellations, she read wind veins and pressure eddies, the city's invisible cartilage. Her right arm was an apparatus of hardened brass and careful screws, raw at the joints where old ironwork had been grafted after the accident that took her father. It smelled of oil and ozone. She flexed the fingers, feeling tiny gears click.
A knock too early for merchants sounded. Hamid, the locksmith from two floors down, let himself in with a grin and coal on his fingers. He carried a satchel of metal scraps and a newsprint wrapped around something small and hot. 'You've been up all night again,' he said, voice clanging with city noise. 'You and your maps. The guild keeps sending notices because you keep not following their lines.'
Iris shrugged, laying a sheet of smoked parchment on the table. On it the wind veins were drawn in ink and copper wire, tiny tabs pinned where she'd recorded the city's sounds: a child's whistle under the Third Span, the low moan of foundries, the harbor's cough. 'They listen with ears, not hands,' she answered. 'I listen with both.'
Hamid unrolled the paper. A headline was half torn: MERIDIAN PILLAR STABLE? QUARTERED KEY MISSING? The room tilted as if a latent gear had been nudged. Outside a distant bell tolled unevenly, an old warning. Iris's breath narrowed. The Lumen Compass on her bench shivered faintly in shadow as if hearing the word.