Liam sat on the edge of the cot, still reeling from Peterâs brief but impactful stay in the room. The lamp on the wall had guttered out hours ago, leaving only the faint glow of morning to wash the room in a colorless haze. He had not slept. His eyes burned, his throat was raw, and his body ached, but the decision was made.
Peterâs words lingered like grit in his teeth. Bath. Respectable. Meeting someone important. He wanted to spit them out, pretend they hadnât taken root. Yet here he was, staring at the dead weight of the graft slumped at his side, knowing he couldnât step outside reeking of rust and sweat.
He exhaled through his nose, slow and thin, then bent to drag the small crate from under the shelf. Metal scraped wood. Inside lay the old tin of burner fuel, a metal box with coal, the cloudy skin of distilled water, the coal-tipped striker. He set them out in order, the way Isadora had once shown him.
The graft hung cold, its glass porthole dark, the gauge sunk to nothing. He flexed his shoulder and felt only the drag of dead weight. Time to wake it.
He rolled his shoulder forward, guiding the dead limb into position. The socket beneath his shoulder clicked as the latches loosened, giving him access to the feed valves. His good hand worked by rote, unfastening the boiler plate with a sharp twist until the panel came free with a hiss of stale air.
The smell hit him at once: old oil, metal fatigue, and the faint ghost of burnt coal. He grimaced and set the panel aside, reaching for the fuel tin. The liquid inside sloshed heavy and dark, thick with the reek of industrial burn. He poured it into the graftâs reservoir, listening to the hollow gurgle as the tank filled.
Next came the water. He uncorked the skin, careful not to spill a drop, and tipped it into the smaller chamber beside the fuel. The graft would boil it down, turn it into steam to drive the pistons. Without it, the limb was nothing but metallic scraps attached to the steel socket.
He fitted the plate back, locked it down, and reached for the striker. The familiar weight sat in his hand like a promise. One spark was all it took. He opened the vent, cranked the tiny valve until it whined, and struck. The flash caught on the first try, a sharp flare followed by the low growl of fire rushing into the chamber.
For a moment there was nothing, then a tremor ran up the arm. The porthole in the plating glowed dull orange, the gauge needle quivering, then climbing. A hiss of steam whispered through the pipes along his shoulder, carrying heat into the limb. The metal fingers twitched, spasming once before curling tight with a shriek of moving gears.
Liamâs breath hissed between his teeth. The weight shifted from dead metal to living burden, hot and alive against his bones. He flexed his hand experimentally, each knuckle grinding like stone dragged across stone. The boiler thumped inside its casing, steady, ready.
It was working again.
He locked the striker back into its place and pulled the sleeve down over the worst of the plating. His shirt clung to him with sweat, his skin still rank with days of neglect, but the graft was awake. He wouldnât leave the apartment half-dead.
Rising to his feet, he shouldered the strap of his pack and gave the room one last look. Cot, shelf, the vial on the ledge. He left it there.
Time to face the city.
The stairwell groaned under his boots, wood warped from damp and the weight of too many bodies over too many years. He pushed out into the street and the city hit him all at once.
Daventry in daylight was never quiet. Even here, deep in the slums, the air throbbed with the clatter of gears, the rasp of saws, the endless rhythm of manufactories chewing through iron and lives alike. Smoke from the chimneys bled into the sky, turning the sun into a pale disk that looked more sick than holy.
People were already moving in thick streams, pressed shoulder to shoulder along the narrow lanes. Children too small for their tools trudged beside men twice reforged, all of them bent toward the same manufactories that drank their strength until nothing was left. Steam hissed from the pipes underfoot, warm mist curling around ankles. The stink of coal, oil, and human sweat hung heavy, a stew that seeped into everything.
The graft on Liamâs arm drew eyes, as grafts always did. Here in the slums, nearly half the bodies he passed bore some piece of brass or steel hammered into their flesh. Some were smallâan iron hand to replace the one eaten by a press, a steel plate where skin had burned away. Others were grotesque, whole torsos rebuilt with pipes and pistons, faces locked behind iron masks, voices stripped to rattling whistles.
The punished ones were the worst. The Reforged. Liam caught sight of a man whose legs had been taken and replaced with crude wheels. He dragged himself forward with a chain around his chest, hauling carts for merchants who spat words of venom and bile at him if he slowed. A woman shuffled past with her hands bolted into blunt hooks, the kind that couldnât hold a blade. Both had the look of people sentenced to their metal, not saved by it.
But then there were the others. Young men swaggering with arms built thicker than anvils, with iron ribs that clanked when they laughed. They wanted it. Paid for it. Made themselves monsters so they could stand longer in the ring or bleed less on the street. The gangs prized them. Some women too, their limbs sharpened to blades, legs turned digitigrade to jump higher, fling themselves faster into a fight..
Liam kept moving. He had no interest in staring longer than he needed to. The graft on his own arm was enough reminder.
A whistle shrieked somewhere close, the start of another work shift. A line of children no older than four shuffled past, each clutching a lunch pail too big for their hands. Some were missing fingers already, little gaps where the manufactories had bitten. For the unlucky ones, a steamgraft would come before they learned to speak properly. The lucky ones would just limp or bleed until they were old enough to be conscripted.
It wasnât only children the manufactories chewed through. Men and women trudged beside them, bodies bent as though the weight of the years themselves pressed on their backs. Faces lined before their time, skin gray with coal dust that no wash could scrub away. Their eyes had the same hollow set as the childrenâs, emptied of anything but the will to keep moving. One manâs arm was wrapped in rags so blackened with grease they might have been part of his skin, anotherâs cough rattled so deep it sounded like his lungs had been replaced with ash.
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They worked until they broke, and when they broke, the city replaced the pieces with iron. Liam had seen it before: hands bitten off by presses, backs snapped under falling loads. A fresh graft, a crude plate, a piston where bone had been, and the worker went back to the line until there was nothing left to patch.
For the lucky few, there was drink at the end of a shift. For the rest, only more work, more smoke, and the long shuffle home to sleep in rooms no cleaner than the factories themselves. None of them looked up as Liam passed. They had nothing left to lift.
One boy stumbled, his pail spilling across the stones. A man behind him barked, cuffed him hard across the back of the head, and shoved him forward. The child scooped up the scraps without a sound, his face blank, and ran to catch the line again.
Liamâs jaw tightened. His graft hissed faintly as he flexed it, then forced it still. None of this was new. None of it would change.
He pushed deeper into the flow of bodies. The city spread wide here, the slum roads choking into narrow bridges and makeshift walkways. Overhead, aqueducts stretched in great stone spans, cutting the sky like the ribs of some colossal beast. The water thundered within, loud even through the stone, rushing from the mountains beyond to feed the factories and the streets. Pipes bled off from the main channels, running down into the belly of the slums, pumping into homes and manufactories.
The aqueducts were lifelines, but they carried weight too. Everyone knew how much of the cityâs breath hung on them. Break one, and whole districts would choke in days. The thought slid unwelcome into Liamâs mind, but he shook it away. Better not to dwell.
He kept his eyes forward, graft hissing softly with each swing of the arm. The city pressed around him: smoke, steam, the clang of hammers, the cries of vendors hawking what scraps they had. Everything smelled of labor and iron. Everything tasted of ash.
The road narrowed as he turned down toward the manufactories. The sound grew sharper, harsher, as though every hammer and gear struck directly against his skull.
It was shift-change, and the children were everywhere. Clusters of them hurried along the gutters, each one wrapped in rags the color of soot. The smallest clung to one another, stumbling to keep pace, their faces blank with exhaustion. The older ones carried them forward, not out of kindness, but because if they fell behind, they would all be beaten.
Liam slowed. His eyes caught on a boy no older than five, his arm ending in a crude clamp of black iron. The graft was too big for his frame, bolted awkwardly into bone that hadnât finished growing. The child swung it like dead weight, the jaws of the small vice clicking uselessly with every step. Beside him limped a girl whose leg had been replaced from the knee down with a piston and rod. Each step hissed and stuttered, the metal sinking into the mud of the street.
None of them looked up. Not at Liam. Not at anyone. Their gazes were fixed on the factory gates ahead, where steam poured out in choking waves and overseers stood waiting with sticks in hand.
One boy tripped. His knee tore open on the stone, but he did not cry. He scrambled up too quickly for that, shoving his hand over the bleeding scrape as if hiding the wound would keep him safe. The clamp-armed boy reached out clumsily, trying to help, but the overseerâs whistle shrieked and both children flinched forward, heads down, scrambling faster toward the gates.
Liamâs jaw ground tight. The graft at his side ticked faintly as the boiler inside it adjusted. He wanted to look away, but the image stuck: small bodies already chewed through, metal welded where flesh had been.
The manufactories took them in young, before they could complain, before they could even dream of something better. If the machines didnât take their limbs, the overseers would take the rest. The ones who survived long enough to grow old enough were already broken into shapes that could never leave the factory floor.
He caught his reflection in a streaked window, the brass joints of his own graft catching the weak daylight. For a moment he hated it, hated the way it marked him as no different than them. Another body carved to fit someone elseâs need.
The line of children passed the gates, swallowed by smoke and the shriek of saws. The sound closed behind them like a mouth snapping shut.
Liam kept walking.
The street sloped down and the air grew damp. He passed a water pump built into the wall of a tenement, its spigot dripping black with rust. A girl not much older than the children at the gates worked the handle with both hands, her face pale and strained as she filled a tin bucket. When it was full, a man behind her slapped her shoulder and took it, leaving her gasping and bent over the handle.
Liam moved past, eyes forward. It was the same in every corner of the slums. Metal, smoke, and children ground into pieces. He told himself he had seen it all before. That it was nothing new. But the graft on his arm felt heavier with every step.
As he continued walking, the street bent east, and the air opened up if only slightly.
Here, the cityâs bones showed. The aqueduct rose above the roofs, a black rib of stone and iron cutting against the pale morning sky. Steam hissed from the seams where pipes had been grafted into the old masonry, carrying water down into the slums. At intervals, spouts poured into cisterns below, where women filled buckets and men scrubbed tools black with grease.
Liam stopped beneath it for a moment, craning his head back. The structure groaned faintly, water roaring somewhere inside its gut. He had heard once that it stretched all the way to the high quarter, bridging the distance like a vein carrying lifeblood to the cityâs heart. From here, though, it looked less like lifeblood and more like a collar. Heavy. Unbreakable.
Beneath the aqueduct, the ground was slick. Runoff trickled into the gutters, cutting oily streams that wound toward the drains. Beneath the city, aquifers ran deep, black as night, and the pipes drew them up day after day, faster than they could refill. Sometimes the water tasted like iron. Sometimes it burned the tongue. People drank it anyway.
Liamâs boots carried him across the puddles, the weight of the graft clinking faintly with each step. He adjusted the strap across his chest, trying to keep the thing from dragging his shoulder down too far. Even reignited, it felt different. Slower. He knew he would need to bring it to Isadora before long. The gears had grown sluggish in their sockets.
A man shuffled past him, bare chest glistening with sweat though the air was chill. His torso had been opened and rebuilt, pipes jutting through his ribs where flesh should have been. Steam leaked from the joints of his spine. Reforged. Liam glanced once, then away. Voluntary or punishment, it didnât matter. Both kinds carried the same stench of ruin.
Ahead, the bathhouse came into view.
It stood squatting at the end of the lane, a block of brick mottled with damp. A chimney on top belched steam, and the stone steps leading up to the entrance were slick with condensation. Two women in patched shawls stood outside, arguing low and sharp, buckets clutched in their hands. A man with the bottom half his jaw plated in brass pushed past them, vanishing into the building without a word.
Liam slowed.
The bathhouses were nothing new to him. He had dragged himself through their doors more times than he could count, sometimes caked in street dust, sometimes with blood still tacky on his skin after a fight. They were routine, necessary, another cog in the cityâs endless churn. Yet this time felt different. Peterâs words pressed close at his back. You stink. Get yourself cleaned up.
He clenched his jaw, boots scraping against wet stone as he climbed the steps.
Behind him, the aqueduct groaned again, water surging through its veins. It sounded too much like a warning.
He reached for the latch.