The Schedules We Keep

About the Story

An elevator mechanic in a layered city hears something off in the shafts: careful, unauthorized adjustments to the circulation that isolate neighbors. Torn between guild protocols and neighborhood needs, he must decide if his hands will preserve order or rewire connection. Urban care and craft collide.

The Schedules We Keep follows Kellan Vero, an elevator mechanic in a city built as vertical neighborhoods where lifts and shafts thread terraces like a nervous system. Kellan’s expertise is tactile: he hears cables breathe, reads the whisper of dampers, and moves through service shafts with the easy confidence of someone who has spent years making machines behave kindly. The story begins with a routine callout to a stalled service car and a small discovery—a deliberately altered braid of wiring and a harmonic notch that shouldn’t be there. That discovery draws him into a neighborhood dispute: Yara Sol, a practical community organizer, wants an extra midday stop to reconnect an artist floor and a children’s playroom; Maren Calder, the Schedule Board’s elder, insists on the guild’s hard-won rules that keep circulation safe. The plot inhabits the narrow, intimate spaces between these voices—service shafts scented with lemon soap and diesel, vendors selling sticky sweetbuns, rooftop gardens and loud, affectionate neighbors—and the city comes alive as both setting and character through precise, sensory detail. At its heart, the book treats a profession as a moral and practical language. Mechanics are not merely problem-solvers here; their hands and tools carry ethical weight. The central conflict is less about a faceless authority and more about the tension between institutional caution and the community’s need to be seen and reached. The stakes are practical: a mis-tuned damper or a sloppy splice can harm people, but rigid schedules can leave lives isolated. Kellan’s response is pragmatic and physical—tracing the tampered notch, rebuilding a feed, and ultimately performing a risky manual retune and splice that requires not revelation but practiced skill. Those sequences foreground craft: manual splicing, calibration of harmonic dampers, and the improvisation of mechanical fallbacks are rendered with informed clarity, making technical detail a source of emotion rather than mere jargon. The book also explores generational friction, the ways rituals born from past disasters calcify into exclusion, and how small communal acts—shared stew, a pot of candied figs cooling on a sill, a child’s tin drum—anchor the stakes in everyday life. A dry, human humor runs through the pages (bad guild coffee, the lifts that grumble like relatives), keeping the tone warm even when risk is real. Narratively compact and deliberately paced, the story unfolds in three concentrated chapters that mark discovery, a dangerous material confrontation, and a climactic, skill-based intervention. The arc moves from Kellan’s private rhythms—his solitary listening and tinkering—toward a public, connective risk that reconfigures daily circulation. Expect a reading experience that privileges texture: metallic tang, grease-smudged hands, the polite mechanical cough of a carriage, and the way routine infrastructure shapes relationships. The prose balances technical precision with human moments of community and small absurdities; it highlights how a single profession’s knowledge becomes a means of public care. Those drawn to urban fantasy that favors grounded, craft-centered magic—where everyday systems behave with personality and consequences are solved by expertise and elbow grease—will find a steady, humane story here. The Schedules We Keep keeps its stakes domestic and immediate, presenting an ethical problem solved by labor, listening, and a willingness to let infrastructure serve people again.

Related Stories