This story was created for Scoot’s ‘Flash Fiction Friday’ event. It’s a fun way to worldbuild and expand this vast fiction landscape. This is the 250 words or less ‘Nebula Challenge’.
Weather in Clockworks City is not like weather elsewhere.
Outsiders think rain is rain. Wind is wind. Cold is cold.
How charming.
In the lower districts, the sky is a suggestion and the air is an argument. Warm drafts slide down the vent shafts, then collide with older, colder currents that rise from the underworks. The result is a drifting fog that tastes like pennies and old regret.
Yesterday the fog had teeth.
I watched a shop owner, wrapped in a wool cloak that had never seen proper soot, stand at the edge of District 13 and stare down into the steam gutters like he was trying to hear a secret.
“You’re not from here,” I told him.
He looked at me too quickly. Like my words were a knife.
“I’m from here enough,” he said.
Sharp bluntness. No poetry. Just a truth hammered flat.
The wind rattled the pipework overhead. A loose valve squealed, then went silent. Even the machines sounded like they were listening.
The gnome’s eyes tracked the fog as it curled around his boots.
“Do you know what they call this,” he asked.
“Tuesday,” I said.
He almost smiled.
Almost.
Then he leaned closer to the gutter grate and whispered, not to me, but to the city itself.
“Who do you think will notice?”
The fog answered by slipping between the bars.
I stepped back.
“Don’t,” I said.
He did anyway.
And the weather, as always, took notes.
