Vee Ironwright climbed out her bedroom window at three in the morning with a satchel of gears, a rolled-up patent she had not signed, and every coin she had saved from selling scrap behind her father's back. The patent was hers. Her father's seal was already stamped on it, ready for the guild registry at dawn. He had done it before. He would do it again. She dropped from the trellis onto the garden path and did not look back at the house where three of her designs already hung in the trophy hall under other names. If she stayed, she would spend her life inventing for men who signed her work. If she wanted to ever stand in the palace and hand the queen a machine with her own name on it, she had to disappear tonight. By sunrise she was in the lower city, asking after cheap rooms and getting laughed at. Her boots were too clean. Her coin purse was too fat and too small at once. A short woman with a shaved side and brass knuckles on both hands stopped her at a fountain and told her to stop flashing silver before someone cut her open for it. The woman said her name was Trace and asked what Vee was buying. Vee said workspace. Trace said the old clock tower on the canal had been empty for two years because the last tinker blew a hole in the third floor. The landlord wanted three months up front and no questions. Vee counted her coins on the fountain rim. She had enough for two months. Trace watched, then flicked a copper chip onto the pile and said she'd cover the third if Vee fixed her gauntlet by the end of the week. Vee agreed before Trace could change her mind. The landlord took the money without looking at her face. The door stuck. Inside, the tower smelled of pigeon and old oil. Gears the size of dinner plates hung from the ceiling on chains. The clock face above still ticked, somehow, one slow hand sweeping the hours. Vee set her satchel on a workbench crusted with someone else's solder and wrote MECHANARIUM on a scrap of tin with a nail. She hung the sign on the inside of the door where no one on the street could see it yet. Trace leaned in the doorway and said the lower city would find her soon enough, and when it did, half the people knocking would be sent by her father to drag her home. Vee tightened the strap on her tool belt. She had a shop. She had two months. She had one job already promised, and a long climb from a broken clock tower to a ministry seat, and she started by lighting the forge.