The soldering iron had a name because naming things made work less lonely. Lena called hers Marlowe, mostly to annoy Ms. Rivera, who insisted that tools be useful rather than theatrical. Marlowe lay across a strip of heat-resistant cloth and glinted like a patient, temperamental animal; when Lena heated the tip and leaned in, the smell of warmed flux was as familiar to her as the taste of the midday pastry that the delivery drones always dropped beside the shop door. One of those drones — flat as a pizza box and decorated with a sticker of a grinning sun — buzzed in now, releasing a paper-wrapped roll that left a faint shimmer of sugar in the air. Ms. Rivera snatched it before Lena could, chewing and grumbling in the same breath.
"If you keep naming every damn iron, we'll have a full chorus of sentimental appliances by Tuesday," Ms. Rivera said, voice dry but soft enough that Lena knew she was smiling.
"Marlowe prefers to be addressed in iambic pentameter," Lena replied, aligning a coil under a magnifier and steadying the tiny haptic servo with a tweezer. Her hands were quick and exact; she liked the language of small things — how a spring could mean the difference between a confident gesture and a missed beat. The shop smelled of solder and cardamom; the cardamom was from the neighbor who ran the tea stall and liked to experiment with savory varieties. Small cultural quirks dotted the neighborhood: vendors who folded their receipts into paper birds for good luck, the municipal announcement that played an off-key jingle every third Tuesday, rooftop planters shaped like truncated pyramids. Those details had nothing to do with Lena's choices about other people's hearts, but they made the world feel stitched together.
A band lay in front of her, its casing scuffed from a nervous owner. Lena eased the seam open and found the tiny ribbon of coils inside, the miniature motor that sent private pulses through skin and air. Affinity bands were the new polite language: a blue flash meant 'I need space,' a quick two-beat pulse meant 'greeting,' and shorthand presets smoothed awkward exchanges. Lena had learned to listen to the cadence these devices produced. She could tell when someone was bluffing confidence just by the faint irregularity in the motor's spin.
"You gonna do it or just philosophize about Marlowe all morning?" Ms. Rivera said, tossing a napkin at Lena. The napkin missed and landed on the solder spool, but Lena grinned and dug her thumb into the seam of the band.
"Confidence patch, like we practiced?" she asked, fingers nimble as she threaded a new capacitor into place.
"Like we practiced," Ms. Rivera said, and there was a little edge in her tone, the kind that meant she trusted Lena but also wanted to see whether she'd let consequences be someone else's problem. Lena nodded and inhaled, thinking about subtle boosts: a warmer haptic curve, a slight raise in outgoing amplitude when the wearer smiled — changes that made other people feel invited without shouting it.