Gabriella fiona's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The last bolt scraped free. The great iron door swung inward with a groan of hinges. Gabriella stayed back and watched the gap widen. Warm air rolled out, thick with oil and coal smoke. Somewhere past the door, gears clicked in the dark. She had wanted a way inside. Now the way stood open, and she still could not tell if it led to help or to a cage. She looked for a trap. The door had no handle on the outside. Once she stepped through, she could not pull it shut behind her. The gauges around the frame twitched their needles. Heat pressed against her face. Deep in that heat, her blade waited, drowned out and silent. Every angel instinct told her to run. Her broken wing told her she could not. Gabriella made her choice by refusing to make it blind. She grabbed a loose stone from the slope and wedged it in the door's track. If the door tried to close, the stone would jam it. Then she stepped one foot across the threshold and stopped there, half in, half out. "I can see the rock," a voice said from the shadows. An old woman shuffled into the light, wiping black grease from her hands with a rag. Brass goggles sat pushed up on her white hair. She looked at the wedged stone, then at Gabriella's bent wing, and snorted. "Smart. Most guests just fall inside crying. Leave it if it helps you breathe." The woman did not reach for her. She turned and limped back toward a workbench cluttered with springs and copper coils. "I fix things," she said over her shoulder. "Wings included, if the bone's still whole. Yours is not whole. But it can be set." She lifted a strange brace of leather and thin brass rods. "Come in or don't. The heat's the same either way." Gabriella watched the woman's hands. They did not shake, and they held no weapon. The offer was plain. Her wing would never heal straight on the moss outside. It would never carry her over the island to hunt her blade. This stranger could give her that flight back. She pulled her foot the rest of the way inside. The stone stayed in the track behind her. She crossed the workshop floor and sat where the woman pointed, folding her good wing tight. The broken one she let hang. "This will hurt," the woman said, and set the first rod against the break. Gabriella gripped the bench and did not cry out. The door stayed open at her back. She had traded the open sky for a stranger's hands and a chance at her wing. Now she was inside the machine that hid her blade from her senses. To find the weapon, she would have to search these humming halls room by room, deaf to the pull that had always guided her.