Every construct is a confession.

  — Royal Inventor Ithamar Oxwell

  The cell smelled like copper and sweat.

  I sat with my back to the wall, knees pulled tight to my chest, and tried not to count the seconds. The stone beneath me was cool in the way that stones in the earth were cool. My uniform itched. My hands, cuffed until ten minutes ago, still bore faint red lines from where the metal bit into my skin.

  No one had spoken to me since they threw me in. No charges read. No questions. Just the steady hum of a ventilation pipe overhead and the occasional squeak of someone else’s misery leaking down the corridor.

  Nume stirred once in my pocket—just a twitch of gear against gear—and went still again.

  I didn’t know how long I’d been there when the footsteps came.

  Two sets. Sharp. Measured.

  Keys scraped metal, and the door groaned open. A woman in enforcer green stood just outside, a baton clipped to her belt. “On your feet,” she said.

  I stood.

  She didn’t cuff me again. That worried me more than if she had.

  They led me not down into the depths, but up—through cleaner halls, past sealed doors and uniformed guards who barely glanced in my direction. I started to sweat. Not from exertion, but from dread. I wasn’t exactly a social delinquent, I kept my head down, did work that got me paid, looked the other way when I needed to. Until now, it had never devolved to the point where I’d been arrested, but even I knew this wasn’t a normal holding pattern. This wasn’t protocol.

  This was something else.

  Then the guards stopped before a set of double doors tall enough to swallow a man whole. The brass trim was so polished it gleamed like wet gold, and in the center of the left door, a sunburst emblem: The Seal of the Royal Inventor.

  I swallowed, but the inside of my mouth felt like sandpaper. A dry heat spread over my chest like fear.

  One guard knocked once. Sharp. The doors didn’t open by hand—they hissed. Steam-threaded hinges sliding them open with unnatural smoothness.

  “Inside,” she said.

  The office was large, but not in the way I expected. Cluttered. Industrial. Not a throne room of brass and glass, but a workshop disguised as a chapel. Shelves lined the walls, full of models, blueprints, mechanical limbs, and coils. A clock tower’s worth of ticking things, some of them watching, some of them just ticking steadily.

  He sat at a worktable near the center of the room, back to me, sleeves rolled up, ink on his fingers. The desk was layered with parts, papers, a half-disassembled construct—and in the center of it all, like a corpse laid out for autopsy, was my listening device.

  Taken apart. Labeled.

  He didn’t look up.

  “You made this,” he said, his hand moving feverishly across the table. Not a question. The light from the window fell across his desk, making his silver hair glow.

  My throat tried to close. “Yes.”

  His pen moved across the page, and the light caught the edge of his glasses. “Without a registered schematic. Without a blueprint. Without clearance. Am I correct?”

  I said nothing.

  He turned, finally. And I saw him: Ithamar Oxwell, the Royal Inventor. Rumored genius. Empire-sanctioned mechanical oracle. The man whose machines had ended wars and razed rebellions. His eyes were pale—not unkind, not cruel—but hungry. The kind of hunger that had nothing to do with food.

  “This shouldn’t exist,” he said quietly. “But here it is. Tell me, girl… did you build the crawler too?”

  My hand went instinctively to my pocket.

  He smiled. Slow. Precise.

  “Good,” he said. “Bring it out. We have much to discuss.”

  I didn’t move.

  “How did you know it’s mine?” I asked, jaw set.

  He didn’t answer right away. Just turned a photo over with one finger and slid it across the desk toward me.

  Bank. Laid out on stone. His limbs twisted, neck at the wrong angle, like a marionette someone had dropped mid-performance.

  Another followed. Jan. Blood soaked through his shirt in a perfect bloom. His face was turned just enough that I couldn’t see it, and I was glad for small mercies.

  My heart pounded, and the heat under my skin flared, sudden and sharp.

  “Didn’t catch the third?” I asked. “Hester?”

  He was watching my face. “Oh, she was quite talkative.”

  The bottom dropped out of my stomach.

  Of course she was. She always said she’d never die for a job.

  I swallowed back bile and looked up, throat tight. “Why not kill me too?”

  At that, his mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. “Because you’re special. Not many people can surprise me. You did.”

  He gestured to the pieces of the listening device laid bare before him, labeled with his own sharp, clean handwriting. A forensic map of invention.

  “You made this,” he said again, and this time it wasn’t just accusation—it was awe.

  He lifted one half-curved fragment in gloved fingers. “You used a pressure-sensitive anchor. Clever. Crude, but clever. And this…” He held up the rewinding coil—no bigger than a fingernail, its inner loop still twitching with residual energy. “This is impossible.”

  He leaned back in his chair, the light turning his glasses opaque. “A device that resets entirely based on vibration. No internal drive. No power source. No core regulator. You’re telling me you built that without a blueprint?”

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  I set my jaw and didn’t answer.

  He laughed—quiet, delighted. “Of course you did.”

  Then, without looking up, he said, “Tell me who paid you to place it.”

  I stiffened.

  “I’m not here to punish you,” he said. “I’m here to understand you. Because this”—he tapped the coil onto the table, where it gave a single, soft tick—“has already been scheduled for replication. My assistants are assembling a test team as we speak.”

  My pulse hammered. “You’re stealing it.”

  “No,” he said calmly. “I’m legitimizing it. There’s a difference.”

  He looked at me again. “Now. I want to hear it in your words. How did you make it?”

  I stared at the pieces on the desk, at the coil still twitching like it hadn’t figured out it was dead yet. My tongue felt thick in my mouth.

  “What, you need a tutorial?”

  He steepled his fingers, elbows on the desk. “I want the logic, not the ego.”

  I shrugged, too sharp. “It’s a listener. That’s all.”

  “Who hired you?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “I expect you to believe I didn’t ask. Jan told me what it needed to do—I built it. That’s the deal.”

  He studied me over the rim of his glasses. “You didn’t care who it was for?”

  “No,” I said flatly. “I care about the work. Not the politics.”

  He gave a small sound at that—something between a hum and a scoff. “Useful attitude. Dangerous, but useful.”

  He lifted the coil again, delicate between his gloved fingers.

  “A listener that transmits a real-time signal, then rewinds itself clean,” he said, voice almost reverent. “No internal memory. No storage. No signature pulse. Once it’s done, it’s like it was never there at all. Just a bit of pressure in the dust.”

  He looked at me again, and this time there was no warmth in it at all. “Where is the receiver for this device?”

  I shrugged. “Don’t know. Gave it to Jan, that was the last I saw of it.”

  He looked down at the photographs on his desk, his mouth twisting, and I got the distinct impression he suddenly wished the guards weren’t quite as good shots as they were. Then he sighed.

  “You didn’t build a bug, Miss Trenfell. You built a ghost.”

  He tapped the coil once more. It gave that soft, delayed tick—like something finishing its own sentence.

  “This isn’t clever.” He leaned back in his chair. “It’s dangerous. Undetectable surveillance tech built from scrap and instinct. No serials. No origin trace. Do you have any idea how many people would kill to own something like this?”

  I didn’t answer.

  His voice softened. “Or worse, how many already do? If someone’s already using tech like this, we’d never even know.”

  “I’ve only built this one—” I started before I realized he wasn’t accusing me.

  He studied me for a moment, then reached for a small, brass-handled lever near the edge of the desk and pulled it downward. A low mechanical hum thrummed through the floor. A panel in the wall shifted open with a click.

  A uniformed assistant stepped in—young, pinched face, too-perfect posture. He didn’t look at me. He set something down on the far side of the desk: a thin folder with a wax seal and a coil-bound packet of parchment paper.

  Oxwell didn’t even glance at them. “Leave us.”

  The assistant bowed and vanished. The panel hissed shut.

  The Inventor turned back to me. “Nevermind its political implications, this device could change our approach to autonomous winding entirely. The retrieval loop alone suggests an intuitive understanding of harmonic feedback. That kind of calibration would take most of my graduate team a month.”

  “I built it last night,” I said.

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “No,” I said honestly. “But I expect you to be pissed that it’s true.”

  A flicker. Not quite irritation. Not quite admiration.

  “And yet,” he said, folding his hands neatly on the table, “you’re standing here in a stolen uniform with no patent registration, no sponsor, and a criminal report that includes illegal fabrication, possession of a prohibited construct, and now espionage against the Crown.”

  I stiffened.

  “You see the problem.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I see it.”

  “I should send you back to your cell,” he said. “Let the courts strip you to the bones and feed your tech to the patent dogs. That’s what happens to little thieves who build big weapons.”

  He cracked the seal and slid a page across the desk.

  “But that would be a waste.”

  I stared at the paper. I didn’t touch it.

  “What is this?”

  He tapped the parchment. “Placement documents. Velspire Academy. Effective immediately.”

  My throat went dry. “You’re kidding.”

  “I don’t joke,” he said. “And I don’t waste talent.”

  I eyed the page. The letters shimmered slightly from the pressure behind my eyes.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why me?”

  He picked up the coil again, turned it over in the light.

  “I want you to work for me, Miss Trenfell,” he said simply. “But in order to do that, I need to legitimize you as well.”

  He stood, the chair whispering against the floor. Moved to the tall windows behind his desk, hands folded behind his back. The morning light gilded the edges of his lab coat, turning him into a silhouette against the sky.

  “The truth is, our Empire is behind,” he said. “Invention has slowed. Creativity has stagnated. The Academy churns out engineers who can recite principles but can’t improvise worth a damn. Meanwhile, our neighbors in Ostrin are making quiet, dangerous strides. They’ve developed adaptive surveillance tech. Flighted constructs. Bio-integrated prosthesis that respond faster than thought.”

  He turned back to me. “If we fall behind, we don’t get to catch up. Not this time. Invention is a currency, Miss Trenfell. And ours is running low.”

  His voice was calm. Measured. But the fire underneath it had heat.

  “We need weapons that don’t look like weapons. Machines that think sideways. Constructs that don’t rely on the same ancient coils and power banks we’ve been polishing for decades. We need disruption, Miss Trenfell. Chaos—channeled, sharpened, weaponized.”

  He gestured to the disassembled device on the table. “This is years ahead of anything in development. And you built it from salvage and spite.”

  He stepped closer.

  “I don’t know where you learned to see systems like this. To feel vibration curves the way other people hear music. But I know what it means.”

  He tapped the placement paper.

  “This is your way in. Full rights. Scholarship on paper. Dorm, schedule, stipend. You’ll attend classes. Build when I say. Learn what I need you to learn. And when the time comes, you’ll report to me.”

  My throat worked, but no sound came out.

  He smiled—not kind. Just certain.

  “Make no mistake,” he said. “This isn’t mercy. It’s recruitment.”

  He turned back to his desk, began methodically replacing the labeled components into their respective trays.

  “You can walk out of here with a student badge, or you can rot in a cell while someone else butchers your work.”

  He didn’t look up as he said it.

  “The choice is yours.”

  I looked back down at the photographs, at Bank and Jan’s silent forms. “What about Hester?”

  “Your associate has committed high treason, Miss Trenfell, and in exchange for her cooperation, she has been transferred to the infantry division to serve the remainder of her sentence at the front lines.”

  The front lines were a death sentence. Hester knew that, but I suppose it sounded better than a firing squad.

  Master Oxwell leveled a look at me. “Do we have a deal?”

  “Yeah,” I found myself saying. “We have a deal.”