Aurelia Brasswing's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Aurelia Brasswing stood at her workshop window and watched a copper bolt fall three stories into Vendetta Row. It missed a bread cart by the width of a hand. The woman pushing the cart did not even look up. Below her window, children played in coal ash. Above them, Aurelia's unfinished lift engine sat on its cradle, half a ton of brass and pressure gauges, waiting for a test she could not risk giving it. If the compression seal failed here, shrapnel would rain on the same families she meant to lift into clean sky. Tessa Wren was already at the workbench when Aurelia turned around. The girl had beaten her to the shop again. Fifteen years old, soot on her cheeks, gloves too big for her hands. Aurelia's apprentice, and smarter than Aurelia had been at that age. Aurelia did not say so. "You've been staring at that bolt for an hour," Tessa said. She did not look up from her notebook. "We can't fire it here. You know we can't." "I know." "Then we go find somewhere we can." They walked the Row until midday. Aurelia counted every place she had already ruled out. The old tannery yard sat too close to the school. The riverbank flooded twice a season. The rail sidings still carried freight. Every open space in Vendetta Row had people living, working, or sleeping beside it. She had built an engine to save them and nowhere to prove it worked. Tessa stopped at a corner where the smog thinned. She was looking at a wall. Brick, twelve feet high, topped with rusted spikes. A gate hung on one hinge. Above the gate, a brass plaque, green with age. Aurelia read it and felt her chest tighten. The Brass Order Proving Yard. Abandoned since before Tessa was born. Aurelia had walked past this gate a hundred times without seeing it. They pushed the gate open. Inside, a courtyard the size of a market square. Cracked flagstones. Riveted steel walls on three sides, tall enough to catch shrapnel. Old blast marks on the ground where earlier inventors had tested engines that failed. A drainage grate at the center. Iron catwalks overhead for observation. The yard had been built for exactly this. Tessa turned in a slow circle. "How is this empty?" "Nobody's tested anything in Vendetta Row for twenty years." Aurelia touched the nearest wall. Cold. Solid. "They forgot it was here." She walked to the center of the yard and stood on the drainage grate. She pictured the lift engine on this stone. She pictured it firing without killing anyone. For the first time, the picture held. "We move it tonight," Aurelia said. Tessa was already writing in her notebook. "There's a lock on the inner door. And someone put a fresh chain on it." Aurelia looked. The chain was new. The oil on it had not yet dulled. Someone else had found the yard first.