The Breath She Could Not Afford

In the city of Asch, the air was owned, and Emmerich made his living mending the machines that let the poor steal a little of it back. The capital ran on coal and pride, and the two together had filled its sky with a smoke so thick that thirty years past the Breath Companies had begun selling clean air the way other empires sold water. The rich wore filtered respirators chased in brass and changed their cartridges hourly. The poor wore clockwork lungs — wind-up bellows strapped to the chest, scrubbing the worst of the soot through felt and copper wool, gasping out a thin, honest version of breathing for those who could not pay the meter. They broke constantly. Emmerich, who worked from a cellar that smelled of oil and burnt felt, was the man you came to when yours failed and the licensed shops wanted a month's wages to look at it. He had repaired thousands. He had never repaired a famous one. She came at the dead hour, hooded, a tall woman whose breathing he heard before he saw her — a wet, ratcheting wheeze, the sound of a lung whose mainspring was dying. She set a coin on his bench, then took it back, as if she'd forgotten it was her last. When she lowered her hood he knew her. Everyone in Asch knew her. Liesl Vauk, whose voice had filled the Opera of Cinders for fifteen winters, whose recordings the air-meters in the rich quarters played to soften the wealthy as they