Brass & Hearth

When Mira Brasswright opens her eyes for the first time, the sunlight on her brass plates feels less like a miracle than a warning. She is an automaton, an impossible creation forged centuries ago by Helena Brasswright, the most gifted tinker Upper Pendle has ever known. Now Helena is gone, her workshop is haunted by an unfinished ghost, and the Crown has decreed that any machine with a mind of its own must be dismantled before it can wake. Mira holds only fragments: a face in her vision, a name etched into her copper spine, Sprocket, and a warning about a colossal automaton slumbering beneath the Grand Clocktower. Legend says its rising will either save the city or burn it to cinders. The Crown believes the latter and marches its guards through every street. The Guildmaster believes the former and wants the automaton's heart for himself. And somewhere behind a locked door, Mayor Elspeth Holt's niece Tessa Bramble carries secrets that could untangle Mira's past, if Mira can reach her before the Marquess's men do. With a clever fox named Felix, a stubborn apprentice named Pip, and a ghost that refuses to leave her side, Mira must choose: flee into the hills and live as hunted scrap, or march into the clocktower heart of Pendle and discover whether she was built to be a savior, or the fuse that lights its end. Every tick of her mechanism is one heartbeat closer to an answer she may not survive.