The chiku-taku of the spinning gears was a sound you felt in your molars. It followed Dimitri Robben as he carried Ember through the ash-choked pathways of Sa-To-Shi, a metallic heartbeat for the slumbering god below. Ember stood rigid in his frost-rimmed palm, the heavy food tray held before her like a shield. The seastone manacle around her forearm was a cold, dead weight, a constant reminder that the explosions she could birth with a touch were locked away, leaving only the brittle, manic hum in her skull. Mr. Cinders, the charred rabbit, swung limply from her belt, a tattered witness.
Dimitri didn't bother knocking. He kicked the door to Ekkoo Ara Hyakushu's office with a boot that could stove in a ship's hull. The door, reinforced with Steel bands, shuddered but held.
"Who is it?" Ekkoo's voice came from within, clipped and layered with a stress that even his usual rapid-fire cadence couldn't mask.
"Dinner, sir!" Dimitri boomed, his grin wide and shark-like.
"Enter."
Dimitri pushed inside, ducking his horns under the lintel. The office was a chaotic crossbreed of a merchant's den and a tactical command center. Scrolls of logistical reports spilled over a giant desk made from a salvaged ship's hatch. On the walls, maps of the Grey Cradle were pinned next to intricate diagrams of turbine schematics. The air smelled of expensive spice, black tea, and the underlying, vinegary tang of the Sanzu River that no perfume could erase.
Ekkoo Ara Hyakushu sat behind the desk, but he wasn't looking at them. His attention was fixed on a large Den Den Mushi, its face contorted into a permanent grimace of worry. The speaker crackled, and Polly Tetsuko's voice exploded into the room, raw and roaring like a boiler about to blow.
"—the damn Jitan blew the hell out of the number ten smelting refinery! It's scattered across the seabed in pieces no bigger than my fist! Weeks, Ekkoo! Weeks before we're back at full capacity!"
Ekkoo's jaw, already tight, flexed. The two small obsidian horns on his forehead press forward. "What about the underwater turbines?" he asked, his voice a forced calm.
A new voice cut in, tinny and laced with a wheezing, cynical energy. Benn Roland. "Oh, they're having a lovely time! One's singing a song only whales and the truly despairing can appreciate. It's a catastrophic bearing failure coupled with a housing fracture. We'll have to surface the whole weeping mess to repair it. Current projections have us limping along at 71.6% energy output until it's kissed and made better."
Ember, moving with the silent, quick grace of a rodent, slid from Dimitri's palm onto the desk. The heavy tray clinked softly as she set it down near Ekkoo's elbow. Her mismatched eyes took in the scene: Ekkoo's arms crossed was coiled with tension, his well-groomed beard twitching.
"We don't have any backups?" Ekkoo snapped, one of his fingers drumming a frantic rhythm on the desk.
Polly's voice barked back. "We've got backups for a leaky pipe, not for the sea itself deciding to rearrange our architecture! The secondary system is integrated! The damage is systemic. It all has to be rebuilt from the forge up!"
Ekkoo bolted from his seat, his body shifting with a dry, rustling sound. He ran a hand through his hair, his eyes darting to a large porthole window that looked out over the grey, gear-studded hellscape. "How long?" The word was a blade.
Benn's sigh was a static-filled hiss through the snail. "Six weeks. Maybe seven if the tides feel particularly ironic."
"SIX WEEKS!" Ekkoo's fist came down on the desk. The blow wasn't fueled by anger, but by pure, throttled panic. Plates jumped. A cup of cold tea slopped over, spreading a dark stain across a blueprint. "You expect us to keep the Hitotsume subdued with only 71% power and raw materials? That thing doesn't take rain checks, Benn! It eats time!"
"You'll have to!" Polly roared back, matching his fury with blue-collar finality. "We can pull from the ore reserves on Agashima, but without the energy to run the forges at full shriek, we can't smelt it any faster! Physics is the god here, Ekkoo, and she's a stone-cold bitch!"
A new voice entered the fray, deep, dispassionate, and emerging from the shadowed corner of the room. Stanislav Robben sat there in a chair scaled for his 66-foot frame, looking like a statue of ice and data. His crimson-tinted sunglasses reflected the glint of the desk lamp. "A variable has been introduced," he stated, as if commenting on a faulty gauge. "If we cannot extract sufficient power from the sea turbines, we must compensate with an alternative energy source." He paused, the gear-hum outside filling the silence. "We could run an additional Lottery."
The word hung in the air, heavier than the seastone on Ember's wrist. Le Tirage de la Mort. The Great Draw. The sacrifice of Ogre lives to turn the Anchor by hand, burning decades of life in days.
Ekkoo didn't turn from the window. His shoulders slumped, just for a moment, under the embroidered vest. He gave a single, grim nod. "We may have to."
"It would function as a temporary measure," Stanislav confirmed, his voice devoid of anything but calculation. "A transfer of biological kinetic energy to offset the mechanical deficit."
Benn's crackling laugh was harsh. "Oh, brilliant! And how do you think the 'biological kinetic energy units' will feel about that? The ones who aren't already half-dead from the last 'draw'? There will be resistance. You're talking about grinding good bone and muscle into paste to grease a screw."
"What choice do we have?" Ekkoo whispered, not to them, but to the grey horizon. "Let it wake? Let it devour this 'Now' we've pinned so carefully?"
Ember, her task complete, had silently stepped back onto Dimitri's waiting palm. He lifted her, the movement smooth and practiced. As he spun on his heel to leave, Ekkoo spoke again, his voice straining for control. "What's the state of the surface gears? Any disruption from the refinery blast?"
From the corner, another figure cleared his throat with a sound like grinding chalk. Charlie Leonard Wooley, perched on a stool too small for him, adjusted his wire-framed glasses. His pith helmet was, of course, firmly in place. "Ahem! The epigraphical monitoring of the peripheral gear rotation suggests a minor harmonic dissonance in sectors seven through—"
The door clicked shut behind Dimitri, cutting off Charlie's pedantic report. The last thing Ember saw through the closing gap was Charlie's eager face, ready to deliver his analysis to a room that was already drowning in disaster.
The hallway was marginally quieter, the gear-hum a persistent whisper. Dimitri looked down at the tiny figure in his hand, her neon hair a shocking slash of color in the monochrome world. "Hear that, spark?" he murmured, his charismatic rumble now edged with something darker. "The machine's breaking. And when big machines break…" He started walking, his steps making the ash tremble. "…they use the little parts to fix them."
In his palm, Ember said nothing. She just stared ahead, her nails finding the familiar crescent scars on her other forearm, pressing down through the fabric of her tattered dress. The phantom voice of Josiah snickered in her ear, "You're a little part, idiot. Always were." She pressed harder, the pain a silent, desperate anchor in a world that was slowly, surely, coming unscrewed.
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