Rivers Against the Current

The river defied its nature the day the Queen disappeared. I was in the workshop basement, calibrating pressure gauges, when it began—an anomaly as subtle as the jump of a needle past safe limits. Above me, Father’s familiar rhythm broke; his wrench slipped against the valve, a sound sharp enough to cut through steam hissing from copper joints. He never slipped.

My fingers worked mechanically, tracing the routine I had practiced for a decade: quarter turn right, pause for mercury’s slow waltz, then eighth turn back. The brass casing under my touch was worn smooth, marked by time and toil. Upstairs, Father's voice carried faintly, muttering equations that lived in his mind as instinct.

The coal engine’s roar punctuated the morning fog, its smoke joining the haze of the city. Nobles embraced modern power, trading coal for progress. Our workshop, with its aging steam systems, stood like a relic—iron manifolds and aged governors juxtaposed against Vale’s gleaming brass, untarnished since spring. The new technology loomed large, yet few dared to question the dependability of old hands.

The air smelled of iron and decay, tinged with the sharp bite of copper oxide. A bitter flavor I had known since Mother’s fever took her. My fingers lingered over the gauge housing, feeling for cracks invisible to sight but not to touch. A single flaw could spell disaster. Could drown the tunnels below. Could betray Her Majesty, whose passage through our labyrinth depended on the system holding.

Through the window, I saw Master Edmund Vale at the river’s edge, his silhouette sharp against the gray sky. His latest innovation—a copper-plated pumping station, bearing the Northern King’s seal—stood as testament to his genius and arrogance. The sealed blueprints on his desk spoke of precise estimations, calculations devoid of the one variable he never considered: us.

The ultimatum loomed, etched in ink beside the blueprints.
Marriage or war.

Our older systems shouldn’t have slipped past Vale’s instruments. His machines should have registered the steam we siphoned through uncharted channels and fractures. But they hadn’t. The forgotten tunnels, the ones not in his diagrams, became our quiet rebellion.

Footsteps echoed—metal on metal. Blackwood. His deliberate cadence announced him before he entered. I grabbed a rag, scrubbing at the grease engrained in my hands, though I knew it was futile. Stains didn’t vanish; they settled into your skin, reminders of labor and resolve.

Blackwood stopped beside one of our mechanical flowers, its brass petals glinting faintly in the dim light. He traced the stem, testing for heat, his thumb lingering over the hidden valves. "Still tending your father’s metal garden, I see," he said, his voice a blade dulled by civility. His hand rested lightly on his sword pommel, the motion a mirror of my safety checks.

“Regular maintenance,” I replied, keeping my tone as neutral as the steam gauge’s tick.

His gaze wandered to the edge of the workbench, where my scribbled notations rested like half-buried secrets. He smiled faintly, a predator’s smile. “And the river’s strange behavior? The pressure shifts? Are those maintenance too?”

A guard lingered in the doorway, his presence as heavy as the coal dust in the air. He wasn’t much older than me, but his hands told stories of labor—burns, calluses, stains. His eyes flicked to the hidden panel behind the bench, the one leading to the tunnels Father now navigated. He nodded, a gesture so subtle it could have been imagined.

The palace bells broke the tension, tolling their crisis call: nine resonant chimes.

Her Majesty was moving.

The gauges whispered warnings in their quiet language of pressure and release. The manometer edged toward red, its rhythm matching the frantic pulse in my wrist. I adjusted a brass fitting with deliberate slowness, the illusion of calm masking the storm beneath my skin.

Blackwood’s voice carried from the garden above. "The King's agents trace the disruption here. Search everything."

The guard approached, slipping me a folded paper as he passed. Its edges were worn soft, handled by many hands like an heirloom. Inside were diagrams—flaws in Vale’s systems, vulnerabilities waiting to be exploited.

There were others. Workers like me, with oil-streaked skin and minds attuned to the hum of machinery. We were everywhere, hidden in plain sight, turning modern power against itself.

I pressed my palm to the machinery, feeling its warmth, its pulse. Father had taught me that the best solutions were often the simplest, the most elegant. Tomorrow, they would return with more questions.

But tonight, the Queen would reach safety.

The manometer’s steady tick echoed through the workshop, a quiet promise that the fight was far from over.