Wires glisten high above Gal, fluttering and beautiful. The wires are falling, falling to her, and in spite of their beauty her instincts make her step away. A net crashes to the ground, the weighs breaking the pavement where she was standing only a moment before. She hears cursing and footfall – a man on rooftop and a man on the ground.

She chases to the man on the ground. He runs and runs and runs, and she gives chase through crowds all too eager to get out of her way. She is not faster than him by any means, but she has far greater endurance – but he can't run forever, and soon enough he stumbles to the ground, panting, sweating, sobbing.

She drags him by his collar into an alleyway.

"Look, just, just, let me go, all right? I'll leave you alone. You'll never see me again," he says. Coins shift, rattle together, and spill on the ground. "I don't have much, but you can have it. Anything, just - "

She snaps his neck before the coins have stopped rolling on the ground. His throat rattles, his bowels melt, his fingers shudder and flex on some mindless reflex. There is a flicker of regret – but if he disappeared today, he would be back tomorrow, or the day after that - then silence, and then she hears it, a faint but familiar tick-tick-tick.

She looks around – but no one, Aridon or Human, is there but her and the dead man. She rifles through his things, stumbling across the cause of the ticking. A pocketwatch. A stolen one by the looks of it with it's gold plating and elaborate filigree of a train. She opens the case and sees a mesh of cogs and gears twitching to a sure and steady pulse. In the glass protecting the gears she sees her face reflected, transparent, over the clockwork.

...a woman that looks like an Aridon but isn't, no ticking you see...eyes of opal...quite the beauty, and quite the bounty on her head…

She is not quite Human, not quite Aridon – not much of anything at all. But the Aridon, surely she is closer to being an Aridon than any other thing, with their metallic skin and gemstone eyes just like hers. What she wants more than anything is to live among them and be safe, accepted, and normal. And she would be, if only she had a clockwork heart.

A pocketwatch. Of course. She'd seen them before – all the rich and the artificers had them. All she had to do was make sure to keep it wound. She snaps the case shut, winds the watch with delicate precision, and wraps the chain around her neck. She has her heart.

Gal's runs the blade along the copper, being careful to keep the exactly along the edges of pattern. She pops out the shape out of the copper and flattens back down with a rawhide hammer, only to realize that the triangle she made is oh-so-slightly asymmetrical. Gal's teeth ground. She was already demoted to busy work after she broke her fifth saw blade. At this rate Talous is going to fire her, even if she is working for free.

Talous is a silver-skinned Aridon who runs a little jewelry store at the outskirts of the Aridon district. He said he'd never seen an Aridon so unfamiliar with metalworking, and often complained that dealing with her was like working with a child. Still, he is patient, if not especially kind, about her shortcomings.

The thing Gal likes best about Talous is his voice. His voice is lovely, musical without being sing-song, but it always carried a grain of irritation at its core. When she learned how pearls are formed, she likened his voice to a pearl. When she told him, hoping the compliment would please him, she only received a puzzled stare and a careful explanation on the differences between pearls and voices.

"How are you doing, Charis?" Talous asks, pausing from the stone he was setting to glance at her work. His emerald eyes glint with disapproval. Gal braces herself, but Talous merely shrugs and resumes his work. "You'll get it eventually. But for now I need you to clean up the shop and put away some of the new materials that came in this morning."

"Yes, of course, it's no problem."

After work she goes home to the inn where she's been staying. She gets by with odd jobs and the occasional bit of pick pocketing, and Talous says that he'll start paying her once she gets the basics mastered. She doesn't require sleep in the same way a human does, but even the most durable automation can't be worked every minute of every day. She undresses, undoes the bandages binding down her chest, winds her heart, and lays down to rest.

It's been a month since she killed the mercenary and took a train to another city (paid for with his money). Since then no strangers have followed her and she's heard no rumors about the price on her head. She's stopped jumping at every shadow and twitching at every unexpected noise. For the moment she's safe. She hangs brass bells she made on the door and rests with a knife by her side.

Her mind slows but does not still. The ticking of her heart is a comfort, well, almost always a comfort, but tonight...

The metronome swings back and forth, back and forth. She was permitted to play the harpsichord for this hour, at her time is almost up. She hears footsteps, and her fingers stumble over the keys.

She works harder, learns faster, and after six more months becomes Talous's apprentice (although he says with a musical sigh that she's unlikely to ever become a true master). She gets paid a pittance, but it's enough to keep her room without resorting to theft.

While she passes as an Aridon well enough on the outside, her ignorance of their culture marks her as an outsider. They nod sagely at the mention of a name she doesn't recognize and chuckle at jokes she doesn't understand. She picks up bits and pieces by overhearing conversations – the names of famous engineers, smiths, and mathematicians, the golden ratio, fractals, oxidation potential – it's just enough from to keep "Charis" from being too strange and awkward.

She's made friends, or at least Aridon that she thinks of as friends. Talous, in his own way, and the copper-skinned machinists Kytheran and Tessla.

She's dodged questions about her family and where she's from so many times that they've simply dropped the subject altogether. She's welcome in places where a human wouldn't be, but she doesn't fit in, and it seems like she never will.

Well past midnight the bells on her door ring. Gal sits up, knife at the ready. The door is only open a crack. She can hear snoring, the ticking of her heart, the creaking of sex, sleepless murmuring, voices distorted by drink outside. She doesn't shut the door. She doesn't lie down, or relax the grip on her knife, until dawn.

Gal cranks the handle of the wheel fiddle, filling the air with steady buzzing sound. The ever-present ticktock of the Aridon's hearts provides it's own kind of accompaniment to the buzzing, and when she hits the keys on the fiddle she does her best to harmonize with the two of them.

The one common ground Gal had been able to find with the Aridon was an appreciation of music. Songs with lyrics were another matter, being so much nonsensical noise, but they appreciate music. The precise categorization of sounds and the formulas for producing pleasing ones appealed to the Aridon sense of logic and order. For the typical Aridon making music is an act of constructing rather creating.

She plays on, a sweetly sad tune, and her weeks of practice finally pay off, her fingers almost flowing over the keys.

The reaction of her friends is underwhelming, like everything else about them. Talous looks faintly disappointed (as usual) and Tessla faintly amused. Kytheran's face is a vacant mask. She's hardly disappointed. Being able to appreciate something, after all, is an entirely different thing than liking it.

The window shatters, and a net cuts into Gal's skin and tethers her to the bed - too fast for her to think, to react - and someone is on top of her.

"Found you," A man sing-songs. "Found you." He is wiry, sweaty, and smirking. Gal squirms underneath him, but she can't throw off the net. His sweat splatters her face. "You can dress up like a tick all you like, but you can't fool me."

Through the net he touches her face, his fingers like insects on her skin. When they brush her lips she opens her mouth and bites down, her ivory teeth crunching the bone. Her jaw trembles, aching to bite clean through. His free fist thuds against her skull as he struggles to reclaim his hand. She yanks him toward her by his fingers, and the net, too small to let a hand pass through, is wide enough to allow a knife. She stabs him in the stomach, once, twice, thrice, until he stops moving.

Her face burns where he touched her, making her feel dirty and sick. Once she crawls out from under the net, she smashes his face into a bony, bloody stew.

Among his things she finds a locket with a sketch of her, by an artist she knows all too well. She knew that she was lucky – if the mercenary had been a little less stupid and cocky, she'd probably be on a train home by now.

The train station is crowded this morning. Talous closed up shop early, since there weren't any customers. It was human holiday, probably, but Gal can't be bothered to be keep track of them.

"Are you certain she'll show up?" Kytheran asks.

"Yes," Gal says, feeling a little less certain every second. Maybe the telegraph didn't make it, maybe there were problems with the train, or maybe Py is more clever than Gal gave her credit for.

"How human of you," Tessla says, smirking. "Just how do you come to your conclusions?"

"Just because I'm not Aridon doesn't mean- " Gal says and completely forgets the words.

Even among the heavy crowds, Py is impossible to miss, her beautiful clothes ragged and her hair a filthy nest of knots. Py is here, like a dream or a nightmare, no catspaw to do her work, the moment their eyes meet she makes a beeline for Gal.

"Oh, Gal, Gal, my precious, Gal. My sweet Gal, Gal," Py babbles like a broken recording. Her eyes are bloodshot. "Gal, my sweet, I've come to take you home."

Gal sidesteps Py's attempts to touch her, embrace her, until Py finally stands there, confused and hurt. Gal swallows her fear and meets Py's lunatic gaze. "I am home."

"No, you're not," Py's lower lip trembles and quiet tears go down her face, "you're home is with me, Gal. Don't you understand? I made you."

"I don't care. I hate you," Gal doesn't say with any malice, simply the calmness of stating a fact.

"Hate me? Why? When all I ever wanted was to love you. I love you! You don't know how much I love you. You don't know all those lonely hours, all years, that I labored to make the perfect statue. I loved you so much it brought you to life. If that's not love, what is? Oh, Gal, don't run away from me anymore."

Those pleading eyes, that cloying voice, those trembling hands - all that love wrapped around Gal clinging, choking, crushing her. Gal grimaced. Her friends watched on indifferently, and she drew strength from their indifference.

"I am not going back with you," Gal said evenly, hoping against hope that if she remained calm a spark of sanity would return to her maker. "Ever. You need to accept this."

"Gal, you belong to me. You're mine. I made you, and that makes you mine. You had no right," Py sobs, "no right to run away!"

"No right?" Gal laughs. "I don't belong to you. Any child could tell you that. If you couldn't keep me, then you have no legal right to me."

"But I made you," Py says, a fresh flood of tears brimming, "and I love-"

"You seem to be under the impression that artists have a right to their creations," Talous cut in, "and that would be false."

"At least in Cassia, D'nyr, Artsuhtaraz," Tessla said, rattling off a few more Devotee cities, "and since we happen to be that one-"

"Both of you shut up!" Py shakes her fist in a way that Gal guesses is meant to be menacing, but looks more like a convulsion. Gal wonders how she ever could have been afraid of her. "You're ruining everything!"

"I don't think it's possible to ruin everything," Kytheran says.

"Although," Talous adds, "everything does get ruined eventually." He clicks his tongue. "Entropy."

But Py isn't listening. "I made you for me, Gal. You were made for me. If you don't love me, something must have gone wrong, some defect. I'll have to pull you apart and put you back together until-"

Looking at Py's watery eyes, Gal thinks that humans are so very fragile. And everything about Py seems to beg to be broken. It would so easy, too easy to break every finger one by one, crack every tooth in her jaw, yank out her tongue with her teeth - but Gal settles for a finger. She grabs finger and snaps it back, not quite breaking the bone. Py's screams sounds more like a cat than a human. Perhaps that's all she's ever been, Gal muses. Nothing but a clever animal.

"There is nothing wrong with me. Leave me alone," Gal says. She lets go and holds Py's head in her hands, and Py's eyes widen, perhaps mistaking Gal's touch for tenderness. "Or I will kill you."

"Gal, I'd rather die than live without - "

Gal snaps her neck. Strangers glance at the body dropping and leisurely turn away, having other places to be, and walk calmly on. For a moment it doesn't seem quite real. The hands that made her motionless. Py's eyes hard and empty as gemstones. She can almost hear the gears in Py's mind slowing, stopping.

It was too easy. But humans all broke the same - if anything, Py was the easiest to break. If only Gal had known her own strength in the beginning then perhaps...but no, there's no point in wishing to change to past.

"It's stupid, but part of me is afraid I'm going to die too now," Gal says as kneels down and closes Py's eyes. She owed her that much, if nothing else.

"Of course you're going to die," Tessla says a bit too cheerfully.

"I mean, soon, now," Gal rubs the bridge of her nose. "Because, because...she made me, she brought me to life with her love and - "

"You are correct," Talous says. "That is stupid."

"A watch doesn't need it's creator to function," Kytheran says.

Gal feels the shape of her heart through her shirt. In half an hour, there would be another train, and she has no time to waste. She has tickets to buy and a claiming court to attend.