The meager earnings from Foster's transcription work felt like a child's attempt to drain an ocean with a teaspoon. He sat at the small kitchen table, the week's pay in a small, crumpled envelope beside a plate of half-eaten toast. The numbers were simple and brutal.
At this rate, it would take him over a year to afford the rumored one thousand-dollar membership fee of the Aethelstan Club. A year was a luxury he didn't have. The symbols were multiplying, the silence around the Davidson case was deafening, and the feeling of being watched by a world he couldn't see was a constant in his nerves.
Ortego clattered down the stairs, shrugging on his school blazer. "You're doing it again." he announced, snatching an apple from the fruit bowl.
"Doing what?"
"The stare. The 'I'm-solving-the-crimes-of-the-universe' stare. Your toast is getting cold." The boy took a loud bite of the apple. "If you need money, why don't you just do what you did for Mr. Havelock?"
Foster looked up, his mind snagging on the unfamiliar name. "Mr. Havelock?"
Ortego rolled his eyes, a gesture of pure teenage exasperation. "The clockmaker! On Oak Lane. You fixed that weird heirloom clock of his last winter when his usual guy was sick. Said you had a knack for 'old, finicky things.' He paid you well, didn't he?"
A memory, sharp and clear, surfaced not from Andrew's mind, but from the deeper, borrowed ones of Foster Ambrose's life. His hands, these hands, carefully disassembling a complex, spring-driven mechanism. The smell of oil and old wood. The satisfaction of hearing the first, hesitant tick after hours of work. Foster Ambrose had a skill. A trade.
"Right," Foster said, his voice a little hoarse. "Havelock. I'd forgotten."
"You've been forgetting a lot lately," Ortego said, but his tone was more concerned than accusatory. He grabbed his bag. "Don't be late for work, Officer."
He dashed out the door.
Foster sat in the sudden silence, the ghost of a skill tingling in his fingertips. It was a key. Not a master key, but a key to a single, specific door. He finished his breakfast with a new, focused energy. Before heading to the station, he took a detour.
Oak Lane was a quiet street of well-kept, older homes. Havelock's Clockwork & Repair was a small shop with a large, multi-paned window filled with a silent, staring audience of timepieces. A bell tinkled as he entered. The air was thick with the scent of metal polish and ozone.
An elderly man with a neat white beard and a jeweler's loupe screwed into his eye looked up from a disassembled music box. "Ambrose?" he said, his voice warm with surprise. "Haven't seen you in a dog's age. Have you come to finally fix my drafting mechanism? It's still jamming."
Another piece of Foster's past, handed to him like a gift.
"I might be able to," Foster said, the words feeling less like a lie than any he'd spoken so far. "But I was actually wondering if you had any overflow work. Things you don't have time for. I find I need to keep my hands busy."
Mr. Havelock studied him, his gaze shrewd but kind. "Police work not enough for you? Or is it the pay?" He didn't wait for an answer, gesturing to a cluttered workbench at the back. "As a matter of fact, I do. A lady brought in a loom. An antique, hand-operated thingie. The shuttle mechanism is seized. It's all gears and levers, no electronics. Right up your alley. I told her it wasn't worth the cost, but it's a family piece. She was desperate."
Foster looked at the complex, wooden device. It was a puzzle. A problem of physics and patience, with no death, no symbols, no void. It was perfect.
"I'll take it." he said.
—
The next few days fell into a new rhythm. Mornings were for the police station, where he diligently worked his cases, his rapport with Martha and the others growing more natural. Afternoons were for the loom, his mind blessedly empty of everything but the alignment of gears and the tension of threads. Evenings were for his notebook, where the loom's mechanics began to feel like a metaphor for the city itself—interlocking systems, visible and hidden, that needed to be understood to be repaired.
He discovered he was good at it. The part of Andrew that was an engineer, a problem-solver, fused with Foster's innate, manual skill. As his hands worked the old wood and metal, a calm certainty settled over him. This was something he could do. This was a truth he could touch.
When the loom was finished as its shuttle slid smoothly back and forth with a satisfying clack-clack, the woman wept with joy and paid him more than he'd made in two weeks of transcription.
Word spread.
Mr. Havelock began directing other specialized repair jobs his way: a complex music box, a self-winding map scroller, a set of automated library steps. The work was irregular but paid handsomely. The ledger of his savings began to change, the numbers climbing with a speed that felt like hope.
One evening, after successfully reassembling a gas-powered lantern that somehow also projected moving images, he sat with his notebook. He'd drawn the symbol from the bone chip again. ○ 卄 ○.
Then, almost without thinking, he began sketching the internal gear train of the music box he'd fixed. The symbols were different, but the principle was the same: interconnected parts creating a function that was unified.
He looked from one drawing to the other. The Grifter attacks caused power drains. The burglaries used manufactured power drains. The old silver was marked with esoteric symbols. The city's infrastructure was etched with others.
It was all a system. A broken, dangerous, hidden system.
He needed to find the blueprint. And the only place he could think to look for it was behind the marble facade of the Aethelstan Club. His savings were still a long way off, but now, for the first time, the goal felt achievable. He wasn't just a policeman or a ghost.
He was a craftsman, learning to repair the world, one broken piece at a time. And the next piece he needed to fix was his own place within it.