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 theybreathed.

"They told me you don't ask questions," she said, and even ruined her voice had a low gold in it.

"I ask one. What's wrong with it?"

She unbuttoned her coat. The clockwork lung beneath was a beautiful, ancient thing — a stage performer's model, built to let a singer hold a note through the smoke — and it was failing. The felt was black. The bellows leaked. The mainspring, he could see, had been wound past its tolerance a thousand times by a woman refusing to stop singing.

"I can't afford the meter anymore," Liesl said simply. "The Opera let me go when the wheeze came into the high notes. This is all the breathing I have left. And it's dying, and I cannot pay you, and I came anyway because I was told you sometimes don't make people pay." She lifted her chin. "Is that true, or is it a story the poor tell each other to feel less alone?"