Juniper Hale kept time with the city. Not by clocks or the tolling of the Cathedral bell—by the thrum inside her palms where brass met bone. Her bench was a slanted island of oil and filings in a narrow shop that smelled of lemon oil and burnt coal. Gears of every tooth and temperore clattered in shallow drawers like caged seasons. A lamp hung over her head, its glass smoked to a honey tint, and the lamp made the brass feathers of the clock-bird on her table shine like a memory.
She was twenty-two but had fingers that looked older: the skin around her nails was stained with the soft patina of machinery, callused where she tightened rivets, mapped with faint scars where a spring had bitten back. She turned the bird's tiny wing, listened to the delicate whine of its wound spring, and adjusted the heartbeat regulator until the little thing spat a cheerful mechanical chirp and blinked a filigreed eye.
'Not bad,' said a voice from the door. Master Kilner stood framed in the doorway, his coat smelling of the river and the warm spice of late-night tea. He was thin, with knuckles like knotted rope and spectacles always perched at the tip of his nose. He had been the only one in Brasshaven willing to teach a girl to file a valve to silence. 'You hear how its heart wants to rush? You draw it back. Don't let the whole thing race.'
Juniper smiled without looking up. 'It needs its rhythm. Like the city,' she said.
He set a worn brass box on the bench. 'You remind me a little of the engineers they used to build with us. This came from a failing regulator at Aether Hall. They would have sent it to the man at the Spire, but he demands fortunes and fine words. We make do.'
She cupped the box. Even closed, it hummed faintly under her palm, a low vibration that felt like distant thunder. Beyond the workshop window the city breathed in a long mechanical sigh: steam valves opening and closing, the tram cables creaking like a chorus of settled lungs, and somewhere far off the Aether Engine's persistent, patient pulse that kept Brasshaven from collapsing into its own weather. June had grown up learning to hear that pulse. She loved the way it smoothed the clamor of the market into a kind of music.
The street beyond the door was a skin of shadow and gaslight. Lantern vendors below the Lower Spokes hawked glass spheres that shivered with captured fog. Above, the gilded promontories winked with the lives of people who never had to patch a pipe at midnight. June thought of that gulf like a seam in fabric she kept wanting to stitch.
She opened the regulator and set to work. When the city was well-tuned, people did not think about the seams. They ate bread and argued, wrote love notes and locked their doors. But seams had a way of unraveling, and Juniper had learned her trade on frayed edges. The bird's wing clicked into place with satisfaction. The regulator settled into a hum that matched the Aether's distant heartbeat. She breathed with it, feeling, for a moment, that everything was as it should be.