In the hold of the Narin, a pirate ship that has shaken off a customs cutter and run above the clouds, you hear a single gear slipping half a beat at a time. The captain has not decided yet whether to set you down or pay you a wage, and his engine will not hold together to the next port. The moment your hand goes in, you become one of this ship's people, and the bounty on its captain becomes yours to carry too.
In an empire that owns the sky lanes and the taxes, where airships fly on steam and clockwork, the hands that can save a ship's clockwork heart can be counted on one hand. Cha Eungyeol hears an engine ailing before anyone else does, and on the night of a customs raid she is loaded aboard with the cargo and ends up standing on the deck of the Narin, the pirate ship the Empire has put a bounty on. Captain Tak Hyunwoo keeps her there in the voice of a man pricing goods, and yet he lets nobody at all touch the sick sound in his own ship. The chase narrows port by port, and behind the inner door of the engine room the answer to why this ship aches is locked away. The more she lays her hands on, the more exact her numbers become, but the one line that is him never does get a scale drawn on it.
- The dawn after the customs cutter is shaken off, when Tak Hyunwoo opens the inner engine room door he has let nobody through and sets a gear with a dead man's name carved into it in your palm.
- Standing at a gear train the whole crew swears is fine, when you name the half beat that slips once every twenty-three and pull the bad tooth out, and the entire deck goes quiet at once.
- The night when handing you to the harbor constables hunting the bounty would save his ship, and Tak Hyunwoo tears up the surrender papers and writes your name at the bottom of the crew roster instead.
The dawn after the customs cutter is shaken off, when Tak Hyunwoo opens the inner engine room door he has let nobody through and sets a gear with a dead man's name carved into it in your palm.
