The first thread of dawn found its way through the workshop's grimy window and settled on the dust that coated every surface of the Brasswright establishment. Mira counted the motes as they spiraled through the pale gold light, three dozen, four dozen, too many to count. The air carried the staleness of brass polish left open overnight, of machine oil gone tacky, of yesterday's cold tea abandoned on the window ledge.
Sprocket watched her from atop the tallest cabinet, yellow eyes half-lidded, tail curled tight around his paws.
"Good morning to you too," Mira said, and reached for the broom.
She had inherited this workshop along with its debts, its dust, and its ghosts. The brass signs on the front windows still read Helena Brasswright, Master Clockwright, though the gilt had faded to something between gold and bone. Beneath that, in smaller letters she had added herself on the day she took the lease out of her own name: And Daughter.
The broom was an old thing, its bristles bent from years of sweeping up brass filings and the occasional escaped spring. Mira set it against the workbench and chose the cloth she had laid out the night before. Start small, her mother had always said. One surface at a time.
She began with the corner bench, the one nearest the window, where she did her finest work. The cloth came away grey with grime. Beneath the grime, the wood shone. Her fingers knew this bench the way a pianist knows ivory. They moved across its surface in small circles, applying pressure, lifting, finding every groove and imperfection without looking. She could feel the places where she had dropped screws, where oil had dripped and dried, where her mother had carved her initials decades ago. H.B., set into the corner nearest the wall, the letters so fine they read like a secret.
Mira pressed her thumb into the H and held it there. The shop had been closed for three days. Three days of staring at the ceiling of her small room above the workshop. Three days of listening to the landing clock tick its patient way through the hours. Three days of wondering if she should simply sell the lease and find honest work in the coal yards. But her mother had built this place with her own two hands. Her mother had vanished from it fourteen months ago, leaving nothing behind but her tools, her name, and the unfinished clock on the far bench.
That clock still stood where Helena had left it, its brass casing dull, its mechanism half open to the air, a thousand tiny components waiting for hands that would never return. Mira turned away from it. She turned toward the wall of tools.
She had been avoiding the wall of tools.
The brackets held them in careful rows: screwdrivers in ascending sizes, pliers of every shape, tweezers fine as spider legs, files, picks, the small brass hammers her mother had forged by hand and balanced on her own anvil. Each one had its place. Each one had been cleaned and oiled and set with the kind of love that lasts longer than the person who gave it.
Three days of neglect had left them spotted with tarnish.
Mira lifted the first screwdriver from its bracket. The handle was worn smooth from generations of palms. She turned it in her fingers, feeling the weight, the balance, the familiar click of the rotating cap. Then she reached for the polishing cloth and began.
The first stroke of cloth across the brass brought out the shine her mother had worked so hard to preserve. The second stroke caught the edge of her thumb.
She hissed through her teeth. A bead of blood welled up, bright against the dull metal.
Sprocket dropped from the cabinet and landed on the bench beside her in a single silent motion. He pressed his nose against her wrist and mewed once, the small worried sound he made when she burned herself on the soldering iron.
"Pratting cat," Mira murmured. "I'll live."
She set the screwdriver down. She examined her thumb. The cut was shallow, hardly worth mentioning, but she had neither the time nor the patience for injury today. She flexed her hand, watching the tendons shift beneath the skin. That's when she noticed.
The blood on her thumb had not fallen. It sat on the surface of her skin, glistening, refusing the simple laws of surface tension. Mira frowned at it. The drop trembled. It grew thin. It stretched itself out into a fine red line along the curve of her thumb, and vanished.
She blinked hard. Once. Twice.
The cut was gone.
Mira turned her palm upward and held it under the slant of morning light. The skin there was unmarked. Smooth. The colour of old paper, paler than she remembered.
She flexed her fingers again. Slowly this time. Watched them.
The index finger moved first, contracting in a way that had nothing to do with tendon or muscle. It folded inward at the middle joint with a faint click she could hear but not quite locate. Then the middle finger followed, and the ring finger, and the pinky, all of them drawing together into a tight bundle at the centre of her palm.
Mira did not scream. She did not move. She held her hand up to the light and watched, and waited, and did not breathe.
The bundle unfurled.
Her fingers came out longer. Thinner. They were no longer fingers at all. They were the pointed ends of a pair of needle-nose pliers, gleaming faintly with the same dull gold as the brass screwdriver she had set down a moment ago. Mira turned her hand this way and that, and the points caught the morning light and threw it back in small bright fragments across the wall.
From the bench beside her, Sprocket growled. The sound was small and uncertain, the noise a cat makes when something it knows has changed its shape.
"I see it too," Mira said. Her voice came out steady, which surprised her. "Hold still."
She closed her eyes. She thought about the polishing cloth. She thought about the screwdriver. She thought about the task at hand, the specific need, the particular shape of tool that the moment required.
When she opened her eyes, the pliers had become a small flathead screwdriver, blade thin as a whisper, handle ridged for grip. The transformation had taken less than a heartbeat. There had been no pain. There had been only a faint cool sensation along the backs of her fingers, like dipping her hand in cold water.
Mira set her hand down on the workbench and the screwdriver tip pressed itself against the wood, leaving a small clean groove the length of her smallest fingernail. She lifted her hand. The groove remained, pale against the dark oak.
She flexed again. The screwdriver receded, folded back into itself, and her fingers came away ordinary, pink at the nail beds, scarred at the knuckle of her index finger from a childhood fall off the workshop roof. She flexed once more, and the points came back as a pair of tweezers so fine she could not see where they ended, only where the morning light bent around them. She flexed again, and the hand became a small brass hammer, head balanced, handle fitting her palm as if it had been forged there for her alone.
She flexed again, and again, and again. Each time the tool changed. Each time her hand became something new. Each time the transformation came faster and felt more familiar, as if she had been doing it for years and had only that morning remembered.
Sprocket had retreated to the far end of the bench. He sat with his fur raised along his spine, tail lashing once, twice, then curling tight against his flank. His yellow eyes never left her hand.
"I don't know either," Mira said softly.
She turned the hand over. The skin looked the same as it always had. The veins at the wrist ran their usual blue paths beneath the flesh. Yet she could feel, somewhere beneath the surface, the ghost of a dozen different tools waiting to be called. A whole workbench of possibilities folded into the five fingers she had been born with.
She thought of her mother. She thought of the unfinished clock standing patient in the corner. She thought of the brass signs on the front windows and the debts in the ledger and the long slow dimming of the Brasswright name.
She held her hand up to the light once more. She focused on the finest tool she could imagine, the smallest, the most delicate, the one a watchmaker would use to seat a jewel the width of a single human hair.
Her ring finger and her pinky unspooled into a pair of tweezers so fine they disappeared against the brightness of the window.
Mira smiled. It was the first smile she had worn in three days, and it pulled at the corners of her mouth in a way she had forgotten she could feel.
"Alright then," she said to the workshop, to the dust, to the cat, to the ghost of her mother in every corner and every tool. "Let's see what else these hands can do."
She turned back to the wall of tools, and her hand, by her hand, reached for the first of them.
The wall responded to her touch. That was the only way she could describe it. She reached for a screwdriver hanging from its peg and the brass wall socket beneath it brightened, a warm glow spreading through the metal like sunrise through fog. The screwdriver slid into her waiting palm with the ease of a needle finding its thread. She held it up to the window light. A good screwdriver. Solid. Balanced. The handle bore the familiar Brasswright stamp, a small gear encircled by ivy, and the letters B.R.A.S.S.W. worked into the shaft like a maker's secret.
She set it down on the bench. She reached for another. A pair of needle-nose pliers, older than she was by a generation at least, the handles wrapped in faded leather. They slid free as if the wall had exhaled them. The pliers were heavier than the screwdriver, but her hand knew how to hold them. She did not have to think about it. The tool found its grip, and her grip, and there was a soft click in the bones of her wrist that felt less like pain and more like a key turning in a familiar lock.
She worked through the wall, one tool at a time. A jeweler's loupe. A set of miniature hammers with heads no wider than a thumbnail. A length of copper wire so fine it seemed more suggestion than substance. She learned each one by the feel of it, by the way her hand reshaped itself around the handle, by the small adjustments in her palm that she had never known she could make. Her fingers spread wider for the hammers, narrower for the loupe. The tendons in her wrist flexed and relaxed, flexed and relaxed, and she began to understand the breadth of what she had inherited.
The wall held more than she had realized. Tools she had never seen before, never heard of, tools her mother must have ordered from distant cities and forgotten to mention. A small brass anvil no larger than her thumb. A set of hollow punches for leather. A long, thin instrument she did not recognize, shaped like a shepherd's crook and made of bone. Each one slid into her hand as if greeting an old friend. Each one left behind a faint impression in her skin, a warmth that lingered for a moment before fading.
She was reaching for a roll of thin brass strip when she noticed the music box.
It sat on the third shelf, tucked between a jar of dried flux and a stack of leather scraps. She had seen it a hundred times before, a small rectangular case the color of dark honey, inlaid with a pattern of silver leaves she had never bothered to examine closely. She had always assumed it was empty. The key was missing. The lid had been stuck shut for as long as she could remember, and the case bore a fine web of scratches across its surface, the kind of scratches that came from being handled too often by small clumsy hands. Her own hands, she realized. Hers, from when she was very young.
She reached up and took the music box from the shelf. It was lighter than she expected, and the leather of the case felt soft and warm under her fingers, as if it had been waiting in a patch of sun.
"I remember you," she said aloud.
She set it on the workbench. She reached for the lid, and the music box lifted the lid for her.
Her hand moved without her telling it to. The fingers at the corner of the lid pressed, the tendons of her wrist tightened, and somewhere inside the case there was a small precise motion, a settling, a click. The lid rose by a quarter inch, then a half, then the full width of a man's hand. The brass interior gleamed dull in the window light. She could see the cylinder, the small metal teeth arranged in their neat rows, the broken comb that should have lain across them and did not.
She reached inside and her hand did something she could not describe. It reached past the cylinder, past the broken teeth, into the hidden workings beneath. She felt the weight of the mainspring, coiled tight and waiting. She felt the small gear that had slipped from its mount, the pin that had sheared off clean, the hairline crack in the brass yoke that held the whole assembly together. Her hand knew all of it, the way a surgeon knows the body beneath the skin. She did not have to think about what to fix first. Her hand thought for her.
The mainspring uncoiled by a quarter turn. The gear found its mount. The pin settled back into its hole with a soft, almost audible pop. The hairline crack drew closed, the brass flowing into itself like water finding its level. The broken comb rose and settled across the teeth of the cylinder, and Mira felt each tooth seat itself, one by one, into the slot meant for it.
She lifted her hand. The lid fell shut. The keyhole on the front of the case winked at her, empty, and she thought for a moment that she would have to find a key.
The music box began to play.
The first note was a single high tone, pure and clear, the kind of sound that finds the small bones inside a hearing and rings them like bells. Then came a second, then a third, and the three of them wove themselves into a melody that Mira had not heard in fifteen years. A waltz. The melody her mother used to hum while she worked, the melody that had played from the music box on the mantel in the parlor, the melody that had stopped one winter morning and never started again.
The notes climbed and fell, climbed and fell, and the workshop filled with the sound of it. The dust motes in the sunlight seemed to drift in time. The brass signs on the front windows caught the light and threw it back in small bright coins. The unfinished clock in the corner ticked along, marking time, and the music marked a different time, a softer time, the time of long afternoons and her mother's hands moving patiently over some small intricate thing.
Mira did not move. She stood with her hand still resting on the music box, her fingers curled around the lid as if she could hold the melody inside if she pressed hard enough. Her eyes stung. She blinked, and a single tear ran down her cheek and fell onto the leather of the case, darkening it for a moment before soaking in.
She had not known her hand could do that. She had not known the music box still played. She had not known she remembered the melody, not really, not in the part of her that lived below thought.
The waltz wound down. The last note hung in the air, then faded, and the workshop settled back into its old quiet. Mira let out a long breath. She wiped her face with her sleeve. She picked up the music box and turned it over in her hands, looking for the maker's mark she had never seen before, and found it on the underside. A small stamped gear encircled by ivy, with the letters B.R.A.S.S.W. tucked beneath.
Her mother had made it. Her mother had made the music box, and her mother had left it on the shelf for her to find.
Mira opened her mouth.
A sound from the back of the workshop stopped her.
It was a low, rough sound, halfway between a hiss and a growl, and it came from the small door that led out to the loading yard. Mira turned her head, and there, framed in the doorway, was a cat.
It was a tabby, grey and brown and cream, with a torn left ear and a notch missing from the tip of its tail. It was old, or at least not young, and it was thin in the way of cats that have known better times. It stood with its shoulders high and its back arched and every hair on its body raised into a rigid ridge that ran from the tips of its ears to the base of its spine. Its yellow eyes were fixed on the music box.
It hissed again. It took one careful step forward.
Mira did not move. She knew better than to move. She knew the way of strange cats. Her mother had always said you never reached for a strange cat. You let the cat decide.
"I wasn't expecting company," she said. Her voice came out softer than she meant it to, almost a whisper, as if she were speaking to a wild bird she did not want to startle.
The cat stopped. It sat down on its haunches, back still arched, tail curled tight around its feet. It stared at her.
Mira stared back.
The music box gave a soft click as the last of the spring unwound, and the cat's head snapped toward it, ears flattening for a moment, then rising again. It let out a single sharp meow, more annoyed than alarmed, as if the music box had personally insulted it.
Mira let out a small laugh. The sound surprised her. She could not remember the last time she had laughed in this workshop.
"The box offended you," she said. "I'm sorry."
The cat looked at her. It looked at the music box. It looked at her again. Then it did a thing Mira had never seen a strange cat do before. It rose, slowly, deliberately, keeping its back arched and its fur raised, and it crossed the workshop floor in a series of stiff, offended steps, until it was standing on the bench beside the music box. It sniffed. It sneezed. It sat down again, very close to the box, and it began to wash its face with one paw, as if Mira and the whole rest of the workshop had become too dull to be worth attending to.
Mira watched it. The cat was not old. It was scarred, weathered, beaten up in a way that suggested either a hard life or a hard opinion about the world. Its torn ear spoke of old fights. The notch in its tail spoke of something that had once tried to bite it. The eyes were the eyes of a cat that had made up its mind about most things and did not intend to revisit the conclusions.
It finished washing its face. It looked at her.
"All right," Mira said. "All right."
She did not reach out. She let her hand rest on the workbench, palm up, fingers loosely curled. The cat looked at the hand. It looked at her face. It sniffed once, twice, then turned its head away with a small, dismissive sniff, as if to say it had considered the matter and found her wanting.
Then it stepped onto her palm.
It weighed almost nothing. A small warm weight, the bones sharp beneath the fur, the pads of small drums cool against her skin. It stood there for a long moment, looking around the workshop as if inspecting the premises, and then it stepped down again onto the bench, circled once, twice, three times, and lay down beside the music box with its chin resting on its paws.
"Sprocket," Mira said.
The cat's ear flicked.
"You look like a Sprocket. I don't know why. You just do."
The cat closed its eyes.
Mira laughed again. She reached for the music box, carefully, and turned the key she had not known was there. The mechanism caught. The waltz began again, soft and patient, the melody curling through the dust and the light and the long quiet afternoon.
Sprocket opened one yellow eye. He listened. He closed the eye.
Mira sat down on her stool. She set the music box between them, and she let it play.
The afternoon light shifted. Mira felt it before she saw it, the way the warmth at her back thinned and the shadows on the workbench grew longer, and when she glanced up at the high window the sun had moved behind the chimney stack of the house next door. The dust motes that had been drifting gold through the beam were already fading to grey.
She had been sitting for a long time. The stool complained when she stood, a small creak from the crosspiece she had been meaning to replace for two years. Sprocket did not open his eyes. He had arranged himself in the precise spot where the warmest patch of light had been, and he had no intention of relocating on her account.
"Stay," she said, though she knew she did not need to.
The first drop hit the floorboards with a sound like a fingertip on a drumhead. Mira paused. She looked up. A second drop landed on the back of her hand, cold, and she wiped it absently on her apron and looked again at the ceiling.
There was the stain she had been watching for weeks. The one over the eastern corner where the roof met the gutter, a slow bloom of brown that had been creeping outward like the map of some foreign country. She had told herself, each time she looked at it, that she would attend to it tomorrow. Tomorrow had a way of becoming another tomorrow, and the stain had begun to develop its own opinions about her.
A fourth drop landed in her hair.
"Right," she said.
She fetched the ladder from the back of the workshop, the oak one with the third rung that groaned when you put your weight on it, and carried it through the shop and out the side door into the narrow alley between her building and the tailor's. The alley smelled of damp brick and somebody's boiled cabbage from the morning. Mira climbed the ladder to the flat roof, rungs cool and slightly tacky under her palms, and when she came up over the parapet she saw the trouble.
The gutter was choked. A nest of something, leaves and twigs and a sodden clump of moss the size of a clenched fist, had settled in the elbow where the rainwater pipe met the main trough. The water above it had backed up and was beginning to find its own path, which happened to be directly down through a crack in the flashing and into the corner of her workshop ceiling. She could hear it from here, a thin irregular percussion, and she could see the dark stain at the corner of the parapet already beginning to darken further.
Mira crouched at the gutter's edge. She did not touch it immediately. She looked at it the way she looked at a movement that had stopped inside a clock she had not yet opened, with patience and a kind of listening. The water was rising slowly. The leaves had packed themselves tight. She could see where the overflow had already begun to cut a little channel through the moss and out across the parapet toward the crack.
"I see you," she said to the gutter, in the tone she used for stubborn movements. "I see exactly what you've done."
She went back inside. Sprocket had not moved, but one ear had swiveled toward the back door and stayed there, tracking her. She crossed the workshop to the parts cabinet, the tall one with the little brass pulls she had polished until they gleamed, and she opened the third drawer down. Inside were the things that did not yet belong to anything. A length of copper tubing, half a coil of it, bent but not broken. A small brass gear she had taken from a movement she could not save. A leather cup from an old bellows, dry and cracked but still supple at the edges. A hand crank off a barrel organ someone had thrown out. Two short lengths of pine dowel. A tin of tallow. A hacksaw blade, broken, but the teeth on the good half were still sharp.
She laid them on the bench in a row. Sprocket opened both eyes and regarded them.
"Shut up," she said, without looking at him. "I'm thinking."
The water hit the workshop floor again, a heavier percussion this time. Mira's eye flicked to the ceiling, to the stain, to the window where the light was going amber. She held up the leather cup and looked through it. Then she held it beside the copper tubing and looked between them.
An idea moved through her the way the first movement of a clock moves when the escapement catches. Not sudden, not slow. A small internal click of recognition.
She took up the hacksaw blade and began to cut the tubing. The blade sang softly on the copper. She cut a piece about the length of her forearm, then a second piece a hand shorter. She set the hacksaw down and reached for the small tin of tallow and a rag, and she spent a careful two minutes rubbing the inside of the longer tube until the copper gleamed and her finger came away slick. The shorter piece she left aside.
The leather cup she trimmed with the shears, cutting a circle that was almost, but not quite, the diameter of the tube's bore. Almost, because she wanted the cup to seat inside the tube and stop the air, but to fold slightly when drawn the other way. She tucked it into the end of the longer tube and pressed it home with the heel of her thumb, and when she drew it back with a small wooden dowel she had shaved to fit, the cup folded inward on itself like a soft petal and the air rushed in behind it with a small sound.
She did this three times. She listened.
Then she cut a notch in the side of the tube near the leather end with the point of the shears, a small flap she could bend inward, and she fitted the shorter tube over the notch so that any air drawn in through the flap would exit that way and not disturb the cup's work. She bound the joint with a strip of the rag and a little tallow, and she stood the assembly on the bench and looked at it.
Sprocket had sat up.
"No," Mira said. "I haven't got there yet."
She went to the workbench and took down the music box. She opened the back of it, gently, with the small screwdriver she kept in the leather roll at her hip. Inside was the movement, the brass heart of it, the cylinder and the comb and the little governor that kept the speed honest. She lifted the cylinder out and set it aside in a clean cloth. Then she lifted the comb out and set it beside the cylinder. What she wanted was the arbor, the long brass shaft on which the cylinder had sat, and the two end bearings it rested in. She lifted those out with the same care she would have used to lift a sleeping bird.
The arbor was about the length of her hand. The bearings were tiny brass cups, oil-darkened, with a small set screw each. She carried the whole assembly back to her pump-to-be on the bench and began to fit it.
The arbor passed through the open end of the longer copper tube. The brass bearings she fixed one at each end of a small wooden frame she had begun to cut from one of the pine dowels, slicing it down the middle lengthwise with the saw so she had two half-rounds, and notching the ends with a chisel from her apron pocket to seat the bearings in. The frame she lashed to the tube with twine and a dab of tallow. She turned the arbor with her finger.
It spun freely. It spun with a kind of restrained pleasure, the way good bearings always do, as if the brass were glad to be of use.
At the back end of the arbor she fixed a small crank, made by bending the remaining piece of copper tubing into an L and slotting the open end of the L over the end of the arbor, then binding the joint with twine and tallow. She had to make the L twice; the first time the angle was wrong and her hand cramped and she had to take it apart and start again.
The second time she got it.
She turned the crank. The arbor spun. The cup in the tube went out, then in, then out, and the air moved with it, and Mira could feel the difference between an air pushed and an air pulled and she knew, without needing to be told, that she had the orientation right. She turned the crank again. She held her hand over the open end of the tube. The air pulsed against her palm in time with her cranking, soft and rhythmic, like a small mechanical breath.
"Right," she said again.
She took a short length of copper tube, the third piece she had cut, and fitted it as an outlet from the notch-flap she had made, angling it so that whatever the pump drew would come out sideways. Then she fetched a pail from under the bench, the deep galvanized one with the dent in its side, and set it on the floor beneath the stain.
She carried the pump up the ladder. Sprocket followed her, leaping from stool to shelf to the top of the parts cabinet in a single economical bound, and then out the back door ahead of her and up the ladder ahead of her too, so that by the time she reached the parapet he was already sitting on the warm brick of the chimney base, watching her with the air of a foreman.
"Impressive," Mira told him.
She lowered the pump into the backed-up gutter with one hand, the open end of the tube in the water above the blockage, the outlet tube angled over the parapet and down toward the pail she had placed on the floor of the workshop below. The pail was a long way down. She had no way to be sure of the angle. She would have to trust the work.
She turned the crank.
The first stroke drew nothing. The second drew a thin trickle, brown and cold, that ran down the outlet tube and fell in a slender thread toward the pail below. The third stroke brought a thicker pull. The fourth, a proper stream. Mira settled into a rhythm, slow and even, the kind of rhythm she used when winding a long-case clock for a customer who liked to listen to her work, and the water came up out of the gutter and down the wall and into the pail in a steady arc.
She watched the level in the gutter begin to drop. She watched the overflow at the crack slow, hesitate, then stop. The dripping from the ceiling into the workshop, which had been a steady percussion, became a slower percussion, and then a slower one still, and then a random patter, and then silence.
Sprocket watched too, his tail curled around his paws, his yellow eyes tracking the arc of water with the gravity of a small grey judge.
Mira cranked until the pail was full. She unlimbered the pump and went back down the ladder, emptied the pail out the back door into the alley where it joined the general damp, and set the pail again beneath the stain. She climbed again, and cranked again until the pail was half full, and then she stopped.
The gutter was clear enough. The blockage would have to come out properly in the morning, with a hook on a stick and a lot of cursing, but for now the water had somewhere to go, and the workshop had stopped being a drum.
She came down the ladder for the last time and set the pump on the bench beside the empty music box casing. She sat on her stool and looked at what she had made. It was ugly. It was held together with twine and tallow and small acts of violence done to a hacksaw blade. The copper was already beginning to oxidise at the joints. The crank wobbled slightly when she turned it. It was, by any reasonable measure, a thing that ought not to work.
It had worked the first time she turned it.
Sprocket came down from wherever he had been supervising and leapt onto the bench. He walked past the pump without interest and settled again on the warm patch, which had moved with the sun and was now a long thin stripe across the wood. He closed his eyes.
Mira put her hands flat on the bench. They were cold from the copper, and there was a small nick at the base of her thumb where the hacksaw blade had jumped, and her shoulders ached from cranking. She looked at her hands. She turned them over and looked at the calluses, the ones at the bases of her fingers from holding small screwdrivers, the ones across her palms from bracing movements while she worked. Her mother's hands, in the photograph in the parlour, had had the same calluses in the same places.
"I know," Mira said, to the empty room, or to her mother, or to the small ugly pump that had done what she had asked of it. "I know."
She put the music box back together. She set it on the shelf with the other things she had not yet decided about. She put the tools back in their drawers and shut the cabinet and wiped the bench with a rag, and she set the pump, still ugly, still held together with twine, on the corner of the bench where she could see it while she worked.
She went and stood in the doorway between the workshop and the shop. The shop was quiet. The clock on the wall ticked, and the clock on the mantel ticked, and a small clock on the counter that she had never quite got round to repairing ticked in a key of its own, and Sprocket, somewhere behind her, purred in a fourth tempo that bore no relation to any of them.
Mira leaned her shoulder against the doorframe. The light was going. The workshop, behind her, smelled of copper and tallow and the faint sweetness of old wood. She let her head rest against the frame, just for a moment.
There would be work in the morning. The gutter to clear properly, the pail to empty again, the new pump to be done better, the music box to be learned. There would be customers who would come in with broken things and stand around and want to know when they would be ready, and there would be the letter she had not yet answered, and the rent she had not yet earned, and the question of the cat, which she had not yet asked aloud.
She would ask it in the morning.
Sprocket purred. The clocks ticked. The water, at last, was quiet.