The Tinker Who Tuned the Sky

Dawn in Verdigris Quay arrived like a sigh through brass. Steam smoked from the teeth of the city, and the towers wore their green patina like old armor. Aya Thorn worked beneath a skylight that had been patched so often it remembered every rain. Her palms smelled of lamp oil and boiled thread; the fingertips were raw where she tightened the tiniest of clamps. Around her the looms breathed, exhaling thin clouds that tasted faintly of metal and bread. The pneumatic lace machine in the corner shivered as if nerves of clockwork lay just beneath its skin. Aya listened for the tempo she had learned to read as easily as a pulse — the stutter that meant too much pressure, the low hum that promised smooth feed.

Her aunt Rhekta was the kind of woman who kept secrets in pockets of cloth. She moved through the room with a pair of goggles on her brow, spectacles stained with years of varnish. 'You oil the left elbow, Aya,' she called without looking up. 'And mind the tension on the sky-thread. If it snaps at the wrong beat, the whole web will sing wrong.'

Aya smiled and obeyed. The sky-thread was a lace of hollow filaments that caught the city's upper breezes and turned them into a kind of harnessed wind — not for flight so much as for small mercies: to lift a market awning, to push a ferry wheel, to cool a child's soup. The lace was what paid their bills and what Rhekta guarded jealously. People came from three districts over for Rhekta's 'aero-lace,' as if it were a kind of blessing.

There was a boy leaning against the doorway, one knee tucked into his trousers like he expected to spring. Finn had the look of someone who had been taught to find joy in the spaces between warnings. He grinned when he saw Aya. 'You make anything that can fly for less than a coin?' he asked, tugging at a loose thread.

'If I could make it fly for free, I'd rather see you fed than airborne,' Aya answered. A small clockwork sparrow, a broken thing of bent brass and dulled feathers, watched them from atop a shelf. Aya had rescued it months ago, and its hollow eye had become the place she kept her small, private hopes. When the sparrow clicked faintly, Rhekta looked up as if a bell had been rung.

Outside, the Quay began to breathe fuller. Gulls argued with the iron vent-flowers; a tram's bell sang in the distance; a steam-barge's keel sighed against the dock. For a while, the world was as it always had been: a succession of practiced repairs and small triumphs. Aya took one last pull of her sleeve, wiped oil across the hem of her apron, and thought of nothing more complicated than the shape of the day's work. She could not have guessed how the city's pulse was about to shift, like a clock dropped from a high shelf.