Reaven's Arc

Chapter 1 of 8

Reaven wanted to raise a cathedral of gears and steam where the city's outcasts could pray in the open. Tonight she stood in the empty lot she had bought with three years of savings, holding the first iron beam upright with both hands. The steam barons taxed every structure that lacked a license. Her beam was unlicensed. The moment it rose above the fence, their assessors would seize it and fine her into the gutter. She had no license and no way to buy one. The barons never sold them to people like her worshippers. A mechanical cat leapt onto the beam. Brass fittings clicked along its spine, and gears turned in its flanks as it settled. She had built it years ago from scrap. It watched the street with green glass eyes while she worked. "You're no help," she told it. Then she saw what it stared at. An assessor's lantern swung at the far end of the lot. Boots crossed the mud toward her. She had minutes, maybe less. If she dropped the beam and ran, she lost the only thing she had ever built for others. The cat's eyes fixed on a paper nailed to the fence post. A weathered notice, half torn. Reaven grabbed it. It listed the one loophole in the barons' code: any structure classed as a memorial to the city's dead was exempt from tax. She had no memorial. But she had the cat. She worked fast. She unbolted a brass plate from the cat's flank and pried it loose. On its back she scratched a name with her knife—a name of the drowned, one of the outcasts the barons had let die in the flood works. She bolted the plate to the base of the beam. Now the beam stood over a name of the dead. The assessor reached her. He held a ledger and a seal press. His coat smelled of coal. "Unlicensed structure," he said. "It comes down." "It's a memorial," Reaven said. She pointed at the plate. "Read your own code." He crouched. He read the name. His seal press hovered, then lowered. He stamped a paper and shoved it at her. "Exempt," he muttered. "For now." He turned and walked back into the smog. Reaven held the stamped exemption to her chest. The beam stood. No one could seize it tonight. The cat pressed against her boot, gears ticking. But she read the paper again in the lantern light. The exemption covered one memorial only. Her cathedral needed a hundred beams, a hundred names. Each new beam would be unlicensed again. And a memorial to the drowned named the barons who drowned them. By morning, they would know exactly who had scratched that name into the brass.