Mike Allen - Clockwork Phoenix

What a crazed, hellish design he’d found. What singularly unfriendly efforts had been spent constructing this track and the struts that suffered its support. And then affixing the lot to a cliff at angles and heights that sent the senses spinning.

But of course this was exactly the point, he realised. The maker of the machines did not want for interference. The Engineer built monsters so others would think twice about abuse or ownership. She made them unfriendly with all the purpose and intent possible.

He thought again of those blank eyes and the unsmiling fixture of her mouth, and none of it surprised him after that.

He took a shuddering breath and then another. He kept his chin high so he wouldn’t be tempted to look down.

The globes here had stalled. To move forward, he would have to climb over the top of them. He clasped each one in turn, pulling it into the shadow of his belly and then pushing it back between his thighs to where it washed against its followers. The soft thud and glub of the waterlogged spheres behind calmed him.

Still, he cursed his newfound friend more than once and then cursed the crazed mind of the Engineer who’d built this thing. But he couldn’t go back on his word. If he failed, the memory would nag and fill him up and leave no room for anything else. He had, as he saw it, no choice.

He gripped hard, chin between shoulders, forcing himself to breathe, to squeeze his eyes shut against the inertia that dragged at him. He focused on stilling the tremble in his arms and isolating the ache in his knees, willing both into ignorance.

Only then did he find the focus to look ahead for his quarry, the globe that determined the current day. And there it was—that had to be it—a globe that stood alone on a plinth, lit from above and below, held steady and rotating methodically.

The lights made it look as though it floated. It rotated slowly, already shifting from a pleasant pink dusk to a throaty, overcast day. He didn’t remember sewing that one. It hadn’t seemed special in his machine, nor had the cloth inspired him as he ran it through his hands. And yet, here it was. The day John Avery had deemed a good day.

He crawled forward, slow but sure, traversing the track in-between. He passed another globe and another, closing in on his prey shining with the bliss of its being.

One final globe and at last he was there. Now all he had to do was stall it. He needed to wedge something into the mechanism to hold it steady. This way he would give John Avery those hours he’d asked for.

The Tailor stood upright on the tracks with the gaping void on either side of his feet. His ankle shook and nearly gave way, and he had to wave his arms out straight on either side of his body to keep himself right.

He stabilised, and let out a slow breath that was too passionate for a sigh.

The globe, by now, was rotating closer and closer to night. Soon it would slip its mooring and sail off along the track to where the other used-up days sat, their coats faded from the harshness of the spotlights. Soon, soon the day would be done, and the Tailor’s promised unaddressed. And he had come so far, climbed so far, was even now perched precariously above the sheer drop that emptied out to nothing but a grey horizon.

In his pockets were all manner of implements and needles and miniature tools to mend the machine. His pockets, however, were all in the coat he’d left on the floor of his room.

He took a moment to curse.

Then he leaned over the globe and found the tiny mechanical catch that kept it isolated, and he wedged his thumb against it—that lean, learned thumb that had been used to pinch and hold and size the demands of thousands of years of sewing.

Almost too late he realised that wasn’t the right spot. A latch opened outside his hand and he had to swiftly move to keep it from closing. There was a grinding noise as the globe attempted to dislodge, and the whole world quivered and seemed as though it would topple.

But it held, the clicking latch pressed back on the Tailor’s sinewy thumb. It held and the bank of globes behind him waited dutifully, and the globes in front continued to bounce along, oblivious.

For one full rotation he waited. Then he waited another and another, averting his face from the dull glare of the spotlights (dimmed but not extinguished, signifying night.) He held himself in place with one strong hand gripping the appendage that kept the lights and plinth together.

The cloth grew faded.

Slowly at first, then like a day where the sun refuses to rise or set, the cloth faded as if smog covered the world. He should let go. Soon he should let go. One more moment, one more…

Brown patches of burn appeared gently, the soft cloth falling to ash. By then his thumb was so stiff with the weight of the latch that he couldn’t even be sure he was holding it anymore. And finally with a click, the globe rolled off.

For a moment, no globe took the plinth.

The tailor had to haul himself bodily over the spot, convinced he would fall, his knees so stiff and shoulders so weak he couldn’t feel when he was touching the track and when he wasn’t. He moved out of the way, willing the next globe into place.

Sure enough, the next globe rolled onto the plinth, latches and catches working perfectly to hold it steady.

The Tailor was too spent to even breathe a sigh of relief. He made to lower himself to the track, reaching out a shaking hand and bending to an awkward squat. He offered a silent acknowledgment for John Avery and his daughter, hoping it had been enough. Surely it had been enough.

He was so wrapped in his thoughts that at first he didn’t realise his hand had missed the track. His own hand, on which he relied every day, and now it fell beyond safety with an almost pre-ordained determinism. It dropped in something akin to slow-motion and pulled the rest of him with it.

His inside elbow scraped the track, following his hand. His chin snagged, but it wasn’t enough to hold him.

And then he was falling.

Head first, body unfolding behind, swooping with an uncanny grace. Plummeting through grey.

He fell and—

He fell and—

He fell.

Nothing caught or saved him. He plunged into the gap afforded by the precipice. He dropped towards a grey void that could’ve been anything but ultimately turned out to be stone and earth.

He fell and hit the hard ground.

He died.

The impact shook free the Tailor’s soul, which blossomed and ballooned above his crumpled form and then spread thin like a bubble exploding.

When it rose past the windows of the place that used to shelter him, only one witness was there to see it. Not the tyros, still busy at their work in the Tailor’s room, bald heads bobbing almost in time to the needle on the great machine.

It was the Engineer who leaned from the window, round-eyed with bemusement, reaching with short, stocky fingers for the suds of the Tailor’s soul. She rubbed with finger and thumb at the smooth stickiness it left on her skin. She frowned and gazed and wondered what other force could call her tailor-man away, and to where. What higher force could there be, she thought, than an engineer?

As he drifted from her reach and travelled, uncertain at first, then with increasing urgency into the grey-blank sky, she merely stood, paying heed to the last of her lost man.

The Engineer seemed—seemed, only—more human than her fellow occupants in this strange place. Were it not for the blank, calculating eyes and the permanent downturn of her mouth, she might be mistaken for a child of—what?—seven or eight. But she moved with the steely calculation of an intellect that had observed thousands of years.

One more Tailor, she calculated, had just been lost. The best one yet. One more disappearance, one more example of the only remaining mystery in a world she once believed herself to have built. It frustrated her. But frustration, like all emotions, was barely more than an intellectual effect. What benefits others received from emotions, she had never determined.