The morning bell above the workshop door had not rung in three days, which meant either the rain had kept every customer in Brakepoint indoors or the universe had finally taken pity on Cogsworth's nerves.
He sat on his display turntable beside the front counter, a polished brass plate bolted to his smokebox reading HOLLOWAYS RESTORATION in Wren Halloway's careful hand. His boiler ticked as it cooled. His pistons rested. Outside, the persistent drumming of water on the tin roof made a kind of music he would never admit to enjoying.
"Awright, Cogsworrrth," came the voice from beneath the chassis of a 1923 Marigold Phaeton. "Hand me the three-eighths socket, would you? The long one. And stop humming."
Cogsworth had not been humming. He had been idly cycling steam through his whistle valve to pass the time, which was a quite different matter, but arguing the point with Wren before her first cup of tea was a fool's errand. He extended his auxiliary arm, the socket wrench dangling from his magnetic grip.
"Madam," he said, with as much dignity as a stationary locomotive could muster, "I was merely exercising my respiratory system. A steam engine of my vintage must maintain regular pulmonary activity or risk condensation in the lower cylinders. I should hate to seize up in the middle of your sales floor."
From beneath the carriage, a soft laugh. Wren's boots shifted on the concrete. The three-eighths clinked against something metallic.
"You've been parked on that turntable since half past five," she said. "I heard you awake from the she'd."
"I do not awaken. I cycle up."
"Uh-huh."
The rain intensified. Somewhere upstairs in the flat above the shop, the kettle began to whistle. Cogsworth's brass casing caught the grey morning light filtering through the high windows, throwing a warm gleam across the workbench where Wren had laid out her tools the night before, each one in its proper place. Wren Halloway did not believe in chaos. Wren Halloway believed in order, in second chances, in the small miracle of an engine brought back from the dead.
Cogsworth approved of this, on the whole, though he would never have admitted as much.
The front door rattled. A gust of wet air pushed inside, carrying with it the scent of petrichor and woodsmoke from the village below. A figure ducked beneath the awning, shaking a sodden cap.
Mr. Periwinkle.
He was the village solicitor, a small soft man whose spectacles were perpetually fogged, whose shoes were perpetually damp, and whose voice carried the perpetual tremor of someone who had once been shouted at by a magistrate and never quite recovered. He clutched a leather portfolio to his chest as though it contained the only dry object left in the county.
"Miss Halloway," he called into the gloom of the workshop. "Miss Halloway, I do apologize for the intrusion, I have come on a matter of some, ah, some delicacy."
Wren rolled out from beneath the Marigold on her creeper, wiping her hands on a rag that had seen better days. She was perhaps twenty-four, with the kind of face that smiled before the rest of her caught up, and hair tied back in a knot that escaped in dark wisps around her ears. Grease streaked her left cheek. She looked, Cogsworth thought privately, like a woman who had been working since before the sun came up and meant to keep working long after it went down.
"Mr. Periwinkle," she said. "You're soaked through. Sit, sit, I'll fetch a towel."
"No, no, I couldn't, I really mustn't, this is not a social call." The solicitor's eyes darted around the shop, landing on Cogsworth, on the half-repaired carriage, on the rafters where a dust elemental had woven itself into a little hanging nest of lint and dreams. "I have a communication, Miss Halloway. From the offices of Periwinkle, Parsnip, and Associates. Concerning, ah, the estate of one Mrs. Hildy Halloway."
The name landed in the room like a dropped wrench.
Cogsworth felt Wren go still before he heard it. There was a change in the rhythm of her breathing. A tightening in the set of her shoulders. He knew her well enough, after three years of sharing this shop, to know the difference between Wren Halloway considering a carburetor problem and Wren Halloway remembering something that hurt.
"Mrs. Hildy Halloway," Wren repeated. "My grandmother."
"Your grandmother, yes." Mr. Periwinkle drew a sealed envelope from the portfolio. Cream paper, a proper wax seal in green, the kind that solicitors used for documents that could not be taken lightly. "I am very sorry, Miss Halloway, to be the bearer of this news, but I am obliged to inform you that Mrs. Halloway passed away nine days ago at her residence in Hollow, and that you are named as the sole beneficiary of her estate. Specifically, and primarily, the property known as the Hollow Garage."
Wren took the envelope. Her fingers, which had moments ago been steady as she calibrated a spark plug gap, trembled slightly at the corner.
"Passed away," she said.
"Peacefully, I am given to understand. In her sleep. The attending physician was very clear on that point." Mr. Periwinkle adjusted his spectacles, which had fogged again. "I will of course file all the necessary paperwork. There is a reading of the will to attend to at your convenience, and there are, ah, certain ancillary matters to be discussed, but none of them need be addressed today. Today I merely wished to deliver this to you in person, as Mrs. Halloway, your grandmother, was very particular in her instructions that you should hear from a human being and not from the post."
He said this last part with the air of a man who had argued with a dead woman about the proper handling of grief and lost.
Cogsworth watched Wren's face. She had not opened the envelope. She was staring at the wax seal, at the impression pressed into it, some small device he could not quite make out from his angle.
"I didn't know she was ill," Wren said, half to Mr. Periwinkle and half to the room.
"There was no illness, Miss Halloway, that I am aware of. Mrs. Halloway was, by all accounts, in vigorous health until the morning of her passing. She was, ah, eighty-seven. She had, I believe the term is, a full life." Mr. Periwinkle faltered. "She was also extremely specific in her wishes regarding you. I was told, and I am quoting her letter to my office, 'Tell that girl she is not to argue with me from beyond the grave, she is to put on her boots and come home and fix what is broken.'"
Despite everything, or perhaps because of it, Wren laughed. A short, broken sound, half sob and half surprise. She pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth.
"That's her," Wren murmured. "That's exactly what she would say."
Mr. Periwinkle shifted his weight from one damp shoe to the other. The dust elemental in the rafters stirred, releasing a small puff of silver motes that drifted down through the grey light. Outside, the rain kept up its patient drumming.
"I will leave you to read the letter, Miss Halloway," the solicitor said. He bowed slightly, in the manner of a man who had been taught to bow by someone long dead and had never unlearned it. "My card is enclosed. The office is at your disposal at any hour. And I am, I should mention, very sorry for your loss."
"Thank you, Mr. Periwinkle."
He turned to go, then paused. His gaze fell on Cogsworth, on the brass of the engine, on the painted nameplate.
"She asked about you too," he said quietly. "Mrs. Halloway. She asked whether the railway engine still lived here, and whether he was being kept in proper oil. She said, and again I am quoting, 'You tell that pompous old boiler I expect him to be in working order when my granddaughter arrives. I will not have her arriving anywhere to a poorly maintained assistant.'"
Cogsworth felt his boiler hitch. A tremor of something he would have called indignation if he were less honest with himself. He cycled steam once, sharply, into his safety valve.
Cogsworth felt his boiler hitch. A tremor of something he would have called indignation if he were less honest with himself. He cycled steam once, sharply, into his safety valve.
"Proper oil," he muttered to the empty room. "Working order. As though I were some neglected kitchen appliance left to rust behind a pantry door."
The dust elemental in the rafters rustled. A faint, papery whisper, like an old book turning its own pages. Cogsworth did not look up. He had long since learned that acknowledging the elemental only encouraged it. The creature had a taste for sentiment, and it would, if given the opportunity, begin raining silver motes down upon any moment that threatened to grow tender.
"There is nothing tender occurring here," Cogsworth informed the ceiling. "I am a precision instrument of the Greatwood Railway, class seven, builder's plate 1894, and I do not require inspection by anyone, least of all a woman I have not seen in seven years."
The elemental settled. The silver motes hung in the grey light like suspended fish scales. Cogsworth watched them drift and said nothing further, because he was a precision instrument, and precision instruments did not repeat themselves.
Mr. Periwinkle took his leave. The shop door closed behind him with the soft click of a thing well oiled, a sound Cogsworth approved of, though he would not have said so under any circumstances. The rain continued its steady work against the windows. Somewhere in the back room, a clock he had been meaning to repair ticked on, unconcerned with the hour.
Cogsworth had been waiting.
He had been waiting, in fact, for considerably longer than was reasonable. Three days, fourteen hours, and what he estimated to be somewhere around twenty-two minutes. Not that he had been counting. Precision instruments did not count. They observed.
He had observed the rain begin on Tuesday morning and refuse to relent. He had observed the half-repaired carburetor on the workbench acquire a thin film of dust. He had observed Marigold, the steam-carriage parked in the bay, begin to develop what he could only describe as an attitude.
Marigold had her own clockwork heart, a temperamental little steam plant tucked beneath her upholstered seat, and she had been making noises all afternoon. Small, metallic complaints. The sound of brass fittings settling in the cold. The hiss of a valve that wanted attention.
"Now stop that," Cogsworth had told her, earlier. "She will be here when she is here."
Marigold had made a sound that was, charitably interpreted, a sigh.
Cogsworth occupied his place on the long workbench near the front window, mounted on a custom cradle that Wren's father had built for him years ago. The cradle was scuffed. The brass of his casing had been polished that morning, because Cogsworth was a precision instrument, and precision instruments maintained themselves. His builder's plate caught the lantern light and threw it back, warm and gold.
Around him, the shop breathed its particular breath. The smell of machine oil and old wood and the faint mineral tang of the dust elemental's presence. The creak of the floorboards above. The drip of a gutter that Wren had not yet got around to fixing. And everywhere, the clutter. Wren Halloway was a mechanic of considerable talent and absolutely no organizational discipline, and the shop looked like the inside of a mind that had been asked to hold every interesting thing in the world and had accepted.
A locomotive's regulator valve, half disassembled, sat beside a teacup with something dried and brown crusted to its rim. Three stacked crates of brass fittings leaned at a precarious angle against a wall of pinned sketches, each sketch a different eccentric design for a vehicle that probably should not exist. A clockwork orrery turned slowly in one corner, its tiny planets out of alignment, its moon missing. Bolts of copper wire coiled on the floor like sleeping snakes. The remains of a mechanical bird, missing its left wing, perched on a stack of invoices.
Cogsworth had catalogued these things. He had opinions about them.
He had, in particular, an opinion about the teacup, which he had been formulating for approximately six days.
The door opened.
The cold came in first, a wet river of it sliding across the floorboards. Then the sound of boots, muddier than was strictly necessary, and the particular creak of the door's hinges, which Cogsworth had been asked to oil twice and had declined to do so on the grounds that the sound was informative.
Then Wren.
She stood in the doorway with rain in her hair and something heavier than rain behind her eyes. Her coat was soaked through at the shoulders. Her hands were red from the cold. She carried a leather satchel against her hip, and the satchel held, Cogsworth could see, a single envelope.
She looked at the shop. She looked at the clutter. She looked at Cogsworth.
Cogsworth looked back.
"Well," he said, because he had been waiting, and waiting was its own kind of statement. "It is about time."
Wren did not move. Her mouth opened, then closed. Her gaze traveled from Cogsworth's builder's plate to the curve of his boiler to the small steam plume he was venting, very deliberately, through the whistle she had installed on his topmost fitting last autumn.
"You can talk," she said.
"I have been able to talk for the better part of a decade," Cogsworth replied. "I should think that would have come up in conversation at some point."
"But you can talk to me."
"I can talk to anyone with functioning ears and the patience to listen. Whether I choose to is another matter. I am choosing to now, because you have been gone three days, fourteen hours, and a small eternity of minutes, and you have left this shop in a state that I find personally offensive."
Wren set the satchel down on the nearest flat surface, which happened to be a crate of brass fittings. The crate rocked. She did not seem to notice.
"You can talk," she said again, and there was something in her voice that Cogsworth recognized, though he could not have named it. A kind of wonder, perhaps. Or grief finding a new shape to wear.
"I have been talking to your father for years," Cogsworth said. "And to your mother, when she visited. And to that sister of yours, who is far too bold with a wrench for my liking. The fact that you did not know is, I assure you, entirely your own."
Wren stepped further into the shop. Her boots left prints on the floorboards. The dust elemental in the rafters stirred, and a thin rain of silver began to fall, soft as flour, catching the lantern light.
Wren looked up at it.
"Don't mind him," Cogsworth said. "He is a sentimentalist. We do not speak of it."
The elemental settled. The silver lingered.
Wren crossed the shop slowly, past the workbench with the carburetor, past the teacup Cogsworth disapproved of, past a standing coat rack that had no coat on it but had acquired, somehow, a taxidermied owl. She stopped in front of Cogsworth's cradle and stood looking at him with rain still running down her temples and into the collar of her coat.
"My grandmother is dead," she said.
"Yes," said Cogsworth. "I know."
"How do you know?"
"Because you have been gone three days, fourteen hours, and twenty-three minutes, and you have come back with the face you wear when something has broken, and because Mr. Periwinkle called on this establishment yesterday afternoon to ask whether I required anything before he departed for the capital, and because he had the look of a man who has just delivered a difficult letter. I am a precision instrument. I observe."
Wren's hand came up and rested on the curve of his boiler. Her fingers were cold. Cogsworth felt the chill of them through the brass and did not object.
"She left me a letter," Wren said. "She left me the shop. She left me the contents of the workroom upstairs, whatever that means, and she left me a railway engine."
"I am not a railway engine," Cogsworth said. "I am a Greatwood class seven, builder's plate 1894, and I was left to you by your father, not by your grandmother, and the only thing your grandmother has left me is the obligation to be in proper oil, which I have maintained without her assistance for some time now."
Wren's mouth twitched. It was not quite a smile. It was the shape a smile makes before it decides whether it is safe to arrive.
"She asked about you," Wren said. "Mr. Periwinkle told me. She asked whether you were being kept in proper oil."
Cogsworth cycled his steam. He cycled it carefully, because precision instruments did not lose their composure over old women and their opinions about maintenance schedules.
"She always was an interfering woman," he said.
"Yes," Wren said. "She was."
The rain tapped at the windows. Marigold, in her bay, made a small sound that might have been a greeting or might have been a complaint. The orrery turned, missing its moon. The mechanical bird watched from its stack of invoices with one wing and a great deal of patience.
Wren had not yet taken off her coat. Her hand was still on Cogsworth's boiler. She was looking at the shop as though she were seeing it for the first time, or perhaps as though she were seeing it for the last time, or perhaps as though she were trying to decide which of those was true.
"Three days," Cogsworth said, after a moment. "Fourteen hours. Twenty-three minutes."
"I know," Wren said. "I am sorry."
"You will be. When I have finished listing the infractions."
She laughed. A small, exhausted sound, but real. It loosened something in the air. The dust elemental released another slow drift of silver.
Cogsworth filed the laugh in the place where he kept things he would not admit to caring about, and he cleared his boiler, and he began, with great deliberation, to tell her exactly what had gone wrong in her absence.
Cogsworth began with the dust elemental.
"It took a liking to your filing system," he said. "Specifically, the section marked C through G. I spent the better part of Tuesday convincing it that contracts do not benefit from being alphabetized into sparkles."
Wren pulled off her gloves, finger by finger. "Is the filing system intact?"
"Intact is a strong word. Reorganized is more accurate. I have spent three days attempting to convince that creature that Cogsworth the Engine is not, in fact, a subcategory of Clients."
The dust elemental, sensing it had been discussed, drifted down from the rafters and settled on the counter beside the kettle. It pulsed once, apologetically.
Wren set her gloves beside it. "Thank you for holding things together."
"I did not hold anything together. I merely prevented the building from achieving sentience and declaring independence. There is a difference."
She smiled. It was the smile he filed in the place where he kept things he would not admit to caring about, beside the laugh from before.
Then, from her bay, Marigold coughed.
It was a delicate, aggrieved sound, like a woman clearing her throat at a tea she had not been invited to. Wren turned.
"Marigold?"
The carriage did not answer. She coughed again, and something in the sound was wrong. It was not the cough of cold metal settling into evening. It was the cough of a thing that had been holding its breath too long.
"I had her running at half pressure," Cogsworth said. "She insisted. Said she would not let the shop go quiet while you were away."
Wren crossed to the bay. She pressed her palm flat against Marigold's flank. The metal was warm, but the warmth was the wrong kind, the warmth of effort rather than rest.
"Oh, you old fool," Wren murmured. "You should have rested."
Marigold's headlamp flickered once. Twice. A third time, in the rhythm of a name she could not speak.
"She missed you," Cogsworth said. "She would never say so. I am saying it for her because someone has to, and I refuse to be the only sentimental engine in the building."
Wren stayed with her hand on Marigold for a long moment. The dust elemental drifted over and settled on the carriage's roof, a thin coat of silver against the lacquer. The shop smelled of old oil and damp wool and the faint mineral tang of Marigold's working parts, and beneath it all, the sweeter, sharper note of the kettle waiting to be lit.
Then the door opened, and the bell gave its small, offended chime, and Mayor Yew Longbranch stood on the threshold with his hat in his hands and his face arranged into an expression that tried very hard to look like nothing in particular and failed entirely.
"Wren," he said. "I heard you were back."
Wren straightened. "Mayor Longbranch. I was going to come by tomorrow."
"No, no. Tomorrow is fine. Tomorrow is perfectly fine. I only thought, that is, I was passing, and the rain had stopped, and I thought perhaps, since you are here, and I am here, that we might, briefly, well. Not briefly, exactly. There is no briefly about it, I am afraid. I have rather a great deal to say."
He stepped inside. He was a tall man made smaller by the habit of apologizing for his height. His coat was brushed, his boots were clean, and his eyes had the look of a man who had been carrying a weight he was about to set down in someone else's parlor.
"Cogsworth," the mayor said, with a small nod. "You are looking well."
"I am an engine, Mayor. I look precisely as I have always looked."
"Yes. Quite. Quite right."
He set his hat on the counter. He did not sit. He stood in the middle of the floor with his hands clasped behind his back, the way a schoolboy stands before a headmaster, the way a man stands when he has come to confess something he does not yet have the words for.
"It is about the Lane," he said, at last.
Wren went still.
"Cogsworth Lane, yes. I have had certain. Inquiries. From certain parties."
"Mayor."
He took a breath. He let it out. He took another.
"Motorheart Industries," he said.
The name landed in the shop like a stone into still water.
Wren did not move. Marigold's headlamp stopped flickering. The dust elemental went quiet against her roof.
"They have been sniffing around for years," the mayor said. "Years, Wren. They want Cogsworth Lane. All of it. They want to put in a, a distribution hub, they call it.
The silence in the shop lasted three heartbeats. Cogsworth counted them against the ticking of the regulator clock behind Wren's workbench, each tick a small hammer against the stillness.
"A distribution hub," Cogsworth said at last, and his voice was very level, very precise, the way it became when he was being exceedingly careful. "In Brakepoint. On Cogsworth Lane."
"Yes."
"Where I have lived. Where I have worked. Where I have watched three generations of children grow up and learn the names of their neighbors."
"Yes, Cogsworth."
"Where Wren Halloway rebuilt her life from the wreckage of her parents' disappearance. Where I serve as her shop assistant. Where Marigold rests her wheels. Where the dust elemental has nested in the rafters for eleven years and has never once asked for rent."
The mayor had the decency to wince at that last one.
"They have offered a great deal of money," Yew Longbranch said quietly. "Enough to retire on. Enough to build something new. They have offered, in addition, certain, well. Considerations. To those who might be persuaded to support the acquisition."
"What manner of considerations?"
The mayor's hands, clasped behind his back, tightened until the knuckles went white.
"Positions," he said. "Titles. A seat on whatever council they intend to form. And, in my case, a personal assurance that Brakepoint's existing governance structure would remain, well. Intact. Under their supervision."
"So they have bought you," Cogsworth said.
"Cogsworth." Wren's voice came from somewhere behind him, low and careful.
"No, Wren. He has told us the truth. Let us honor him for it. He has told us they have bought him, and he has come here, on a day when the rain has stopped, to warn us before the contract is signed."
The mayor closed his eyes. He looked, in that moment, like a man who had been carrying a stone in his coat pocket for a very long time and had only just discovered how heavy it was.
"I have not signed," he said. "Not yet. I came to warn you. I came to tell Wren, in particular, that the offer on her property is, in monetary terms, exceptionally generous. And that if she wishes to take it, I will not stand in her way. I will not, in fact, be able to stand in anyone's way for very much longer, because the Enforcers from the Covenant arrived this morning."
Cogsworth heard Wren draw in a sharp breath. He heard Marigold's headlamp flicker twice and then go dark, as if the old carriage had decided that what was coming next did not require light.
"Covenant Enforcers," Cogsworth said. "In Brakepoint."
"Three of them," the mayor confirmed. "At the inn. Asking questions. They have papers. The papers say they are investigating unregistered mechanical anomalies in the western valleys."
"Unregistered mechanical anomalies."
"That is the phrase they used."
"Ah." Cogsworth rolled slightly forward on his rails, a small, automatic motion that he made when he was thinking. "And what, in their opinion, constitutes a mechanical anomaly?"
The mayor met his eye. "Sentience," he said. "Self-directed motion. Philosophical inquiry. The use of personal pronouns by objects not designed to possess them."
"I see."
"Cogsworth." The mayor stepped forward, and there was something urgent in his voice now, something that had been waiting behind all the careful words. "I have known you for thirty-seven years. I watched you roll into this town as a young engine, full of yourself and your Greatwood pedigree, and I have watched you become something I did not know machines could become. I am not here to betray you. I am here because Mr. Periwinkle sent word, three days ago, that the Covenant had finally taken an interest."
Mr. Periwinkle. The name surfaced in Cogsworth's memory like a coin from the bottom of a pond. The Covenant liaison. A small man with spectacles and a quiet manner, who had, for twenty years, filed the paperwork on Brakepoint's small irregularities and asked no questions in return.
"He warned you," Cogsworth said.
"He warned me. And he warned me that the warning was his last. That the new administration in the eastern territories had finally decided that Brakepoint was worth the trouble of, as he put it, correcting."
Outside, the wind shifted. It carried with it the smell of rain beginning again somewhere over the hills, and beneath it, faintly, the metallic tang of something that had been polished recently and not yet let go of its newness. Cogsworth knew that smell. It was the smell of the Covenant's lacquer, the particular chemical blend they used on their Enforcers' boots.
"They are outside," he said.
The mayor nodded.
"They have been outside for the length of this conversation."
Wren made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite a sob. "Hildy," she said. "Where is Hildy?"
"She is upstairs," Cogsworth said. "Mapping the coal cellar again. She believes she has discovered a previously unrecorded draft pattern."
"I will go to her."
"Wren. Wait."
She stopped.
"If they have come for me," Cogsworth said, "and they have come for me, then it is not your shop they want. It is me. And if you are seen to be harboring me, then your inheritance becomes a liability rather than a gift. You understand what I am telling you."
"I understand what you are telling me."
"And you will not do it."
"Cogsworth."
"You will not do it because you are Wren Halloway, and Wren Halloway does not abandon her friends to the Covenant's lacquered boots. But I am asking you, as your shop assistant and your self-appointed moral compass, to consider the possibility that this is the one occasion on which Wren Halloway is wrong."
The dust elemental chose that moment to detach itself from the rafters. It drifted down in a slow spiral, shedding motes of itself like a dandelion going to seed, and settled, very gently, on Cogsworth's cowcatcher. It did not speak. It simply pressed itself against him, warm and present, as if to say that it had heard everything and had chosen its side.
"Marigold," Cogsworth said.
The old carriage's headlamp flickered back on. "I am here," she said. Her voice was small and dry and very old. "I have been here the whole time."
"If I am taken, the shop will need you."
"The shop will need more than me."
"The shop will need Wren. And Wren will need to know that someone is looking after the work she cannot do. Can you do that, Marigold? Can you be her hands, when hers are full of something else?"
Marigold was quiet for a long moment.
"I was built to carry passengers," she said at last. "I have carried kings. I have carried fugitives. I have carried, on one occasion, a wedding cake that weighed more than the bride. I can carry Wren Halloway's work for as long as she needs me to."
"Good."
"Cogsworth."
"Yes, Marigold."
"You are not going with them."
It was not a question. Cogsworth felt something shift in his boiler, a small rearrangement of pressure that had nothing to do with steam.
"I have thought about this for some time," he said. "Thirty-seven years, in fact. I have thought about what I would do, if they ever came. I had rather hoped they would not come in my lifetime. Engines of my class are built to last a hundred and twenty years, and I had planned to spend the remaining eighty-three in pleasant philosophical disputation with Mr. Periwinkle's replacement."
"And?"
"And the replacement never came. And the Covenant grew tired of waiting. And so here we are."
The door opened.
Three figures stood in the threshold. They were dressed in the deep blue of the Covenant's enforcement corps, and their boots shone with that particular chemical shine, and their faces had the careful blankness of men who have been trained to expect nothing from the objects they collect.
The one in the center spoke.
"Cogsworth the Engine," he said. "You are classified as a Class Three Mechanical Anomaly under the provisions of the Accord of Auld. You will accompany us."
Cogsworth looked past them, into the gray afternoon, at the hills beyond Brakepoint where the leyline junctions still hummed their quiet song. He looked at Wren, who was standing very still by her workbench with one hand on the regulator clock as if she could hold time in place by gripping it. He looked at the mayor, who had tears on his face and who had, at the last, done the only brave thing he had ever done. He looked at Marigold, whose headlamp was burning steady now, a small bright defiance.
He looked at the dust elemental, still pressed against his cowcatcher, still warm.
"I will need a moment," he said. "To say goodbye."
"You will have no moment."
"Then I will take one anyway."
He whistled, low and clear, a sound that had traveled the Greatwood Railway in his younger days and could still, he found, carry across a quiet shop on a gray afternoon. The sound rolled out through the open door, past the Enforcers, down Cogsworth Lane, into the hills.
Somewhere, far off, a leyline answered.
"Now," Cogsworth said. "I am ready."