"West four thirty-six!"

The gunner’s adrenaline-blurred eyes glanced at the radial tick-marks in the brass cannon holder. His left hand flipped up a locked latch while his right spun loose a knob and then both worked in unison to find the two numbers on the dial. Fifty small ticks for each four sectioned-off quarters of the rotatable cannon mount. He found 36 between two rusted-away numbers and notched the cannon back into place.

“Ready!” He shouted with a nod toward the bridge. His right hand spun the knob tight again.

“Fire!” was the immediate - he thought, even desperate - reply.

The left index finger on the gunner responded before his mind told it to, and the sharp crack of the semi-automatized gun dosed him once more with a hit of adrenaline. He never wanted to watch the cannon ball land. Not that he could see where it landed. Not today. Too much smoke in the clouds. Not enough breeze in the sails.

While the low-deck clockwork fed another charge and ball into the West-facing cannon, the gunner pondered the dwindling breeze and its effect on the assault.

They had been in the air for two weeks now – anchored in this very spot for three days. Only now had they seen any sign of the rebel resistance. And it was as if they didn’t want to destroy their blockade, just pester the individuals in charge of holding it.

A buzz notified him and the commander that his chamber was reloaded, and the cycle began again.

“West four thirty-two!”

A pause.

“Ready!”

“Fire!”Crack.

Fizz, whir, schk, whir.

Bzzt.

“West four thirty!”

The other four cannoneers spread behind their guns around the perimeter of the airship relayed and responded in the same way as West four thirty. Not a break in thirty hours, except for the regular change of commanders. Because the commanders had to sleep – it was the disadvantage of insisting on human commanders for otherwise autonomous defense vessels.

The booming siege-fire from what scouts called four light blockade runners hadn’t ceased in that time.

But now the horizon stilled.

“Cease!” called Joan, the commander-on-duty. She kept her eyes peeled for motion, refusing to trust the semi-circular array of gleaming telescopes dotting the bridge railing.

“Arms at ready!” she instructed, not disguising her apprehension.

Voices muffled by the dense cumulous curtains reached Joan’s ears. She thought back to the scouts’ maps and tried to think how delayed those voices might be.

A dim shadow crept across the canvas of a cloud to the east of their position. Joan’s eyes fixed on the outline and anticipated its arrival around the empty side of the cloud.

“ALL EAST ONE-TWELVE!” she cried, biting her tongue to hold the command to fire until she confirmed the hostile ship’s colors.

Two automatonic voices chimed back to the commander-on-duty, “Ready!”

Two beads of sweat raced down Joan’s cratered right cheek. A buttress poked through the cloud, moving quickly to reveal the ship casting the shadow was rushing the blockade straight on.

She thought a blockade runner had been sneaking westward in front of her.

In fact she had less than twelve seconds before a heavy frigate smashed her sparse defense post to dust.

She had always been scared of heights.

“Fire!” Joan yelled, over the din of splintering wood and springing clockwork and screeching metal, and maybe one cannon fired its round off into the irrelevant distance while she grunted as her body was ground between the unmoving deck and unstoppable warship.

Joseph insisted on being called Joe.

“Joseph, please come here.” He quickly obeyed his mother’s controlled plea. He even left the dusty book where he dropped it to make such a startling crash in the still, solemn room.

Joseph and his mother huddled between two other families in similar postures. They occupied a preserves-cellar two levels beneath the surface streets along with too many other people. This was the tensest time of the week, and Joseph was frustrated that the cellar nights kept changing – in fact, coming more often and for longer every night. He was starting to fall behind on his schoolwork.

No other kids had trouble keeping up with the day-lessons Joe struggled with. He tolerated his mother’s firm, stroking arm. When she stopped fussing over him, he let his head fall into his cupped hands. His bony elbows dug into his thighs in the groove just above his knees. Cellar night meant he couldn’t read. But tonight had started so early there was still a clover-patch of dim light spilling through the hatch and Joe had discovered an abandoned bookshelf against one wall of the room. He pulled on one spine which disintegrated in his grip, and slapped the packed-dirt floor with enough force to draw gasps from the nearest clusters of nervous people. He apologized with his posture and eyes, to ashamed to make his voice.

Tonight was different because they had gotten to the cellar earlier than usual and also that there was a thunder rolling all the time above them. Mother had explained this to him earlier that day, and Joe tried to fill his time by practicing this memory.

“Joe, come bring your book over here for a minute.” He silently obeyed, from what he remembered.

“We’re having cellar night tonight,” his face dropped, “and it’s going to be a little different. That’s because tonight is the night when the king’s army is going to protect us and fight back against…” her voice trailed off and caught.

“Against the sky fighters?”

His mother nodded. “Yes. But they will be on the ground tonight, making lots of loud noises. It won’t be so bad when we are in the cellar, but tonight will be especially long and hard. I need you to be strong, okay?” He felt her iron grip through his small biceps and squeeze the bone itself. He would be stronger when she let go.

Now in the pitch dark, among a sniffling congregation, Joe understood what hard meant. The thunder kept rolling closer and closer – so unnaturally loud that he was afraid the roof would cave in all the way down to where they sat in the second cellar.

When the rumbling finally died down, Joe relaxed and uncapped his hands from his ears, and also realized that his hands had been cupped over his ears.

His heart settled into a regular rhythm before the cruel King’s weapons pounded all at once into the sky and deep underground the shock waves punched any cloistered refugees in the gut.

Three screams lit the air in that cellar, but Joe did not contribute to one of them. He felt his jaw clench and heart pound bitterness into his mouth and behind his eyes, but he did not cry out. His mother’s arms clutched at his scrawny frame in the darkness and he remembered how much there was to lose in the darkness of the cellar.

For what may have been only half an hour, the ground assault perpetuated, but every blast was not as devastating as the first, which had been all the guns firing in unison. Joe eventually settled back into an uncomfortable reclining position and was grateful no one could see his awkward, long legs folded up on top of one another, propped up in the crack in the wall.

Eventually, he slept.

His mother shook him awake and his eyes opened to the same darkness as behind his eyelids. He rubbed them, blinked, and latched on to his mother’s hand. She led him to the ladder and together they climbed out to the street. Above, the sky was clear and smelled of heat even in the autumn chill. His mother tapped him before they started to walk home and pointed down the road. At the very end of the street, Joe watched one of the King’s Guns round a corner and disappear into the lattice city.

He was glad he and his mom lived away from the city. Maybe the Sky Soldiers wouldn’t care about their little town. Maybe they would start there and group themselves at the school as a headquarters to launch an attack against the city.

Somehow, his mother had dragged his dreaming body back home.

“Mom?”

“Hm?” She pulled back her black and grey-striped hair from her face. Joe paused and she watched him carefully.

“When will cellar nights be over?” Joe meant it to be a simple question, but he noticed each of his mom’s eyes glaze with a tear in the just-lit candlelight.

“I don’t know,” she croaked out. “Go to bed, now.” Joe scrambled up the ladder to his lofted bedroom.

The moonlight and stars lit his path to his own candle, which he lit after finding a dry match. He quietly cursed that afternoon’s rain.

Joe shrugged off his scratchy school-clothes which he never changed out of that day. Once in his bed, his mother poked her head into his space and knocked on his floor. The loft was open and looked across the house to the kitchen, and lay directly above his mother’s bed and window. She would often make one last goodnight before heading to bed herself.

“I think you can sleep long tonight and I won’t wake you up for school so early tomorrow.”

Joe tried to look as sleepy and grateful as he could without betraying his energizing elation.

“G’night mumma,” he mumbled.

“Goodnight, sweet one,” she replied.

Her head disappeared and Joe threw his fists in the air in silent celebration. He hoped the creaking bed wouldn’t alert his mom to the strangeness of what he was doing. A grin plastered on his truly exhausted body, Joe leaned over to blow out the candle he only just lit.

His eyes caught the photograph propped on the bookshelf next to his bed. His grin lost all investment but still remained. He blew the candle out solemnly and settled into bed. He drew the sheets up all the way to his chin and imagined his aunt coming to tuck him in like she always would, rewarding his goofy, all-lip smile with a forehead kiss.

He missed aunt Joan.

Cellar nights occurred at most once a week for the rest of the year. Each day grew longer and the cold children in Joseph’s class lost interest in their lessons and took every opportunity to daydream of the coming winter. In their minds it commenced at the first snowfall of the year, when the whole world got frosted in powdered sugar overnight. In October, snow wouldn’t stick for long, and the premature frost melted by noon. Still, the children in Leicester buzzed with glistening excitement for the season of their favorite holiday.

“I’m going to ask for candy!” declared Susan.

“I’m going to ask for a new brush!”

“I want an automaton that does my homework!” Several of the children around the lunch table giggled.

“I want a train set!”

“What do you want for Christmas, Joseph?” inquired a big girl with a smart head.

“Um, I think I want a clock.” The kids who heard him stared at him with unmasked confusion.

“Why do you want a clock?”

“So you can take it apart and see how it works and maybe when you put it back together it runs just the same.”

“Do you want to be a Tinker?”

Recognition graced over the confused faces of his classmates. He smiled and showed two gaps in his teeth.

“Yeah!” With this, a new level of conversation sprang into existence.

“My dad’s a Tinker and he told me he loved gears when he was a –”

“I heard Tinkers work for the King himself!”

“Tinkers can live wherever they want and they have such big houses!”

“Yeah, Tinkers are sooooo rich!”

“My Dad –”

“Joe! You have to be a Tinker!”

“- so cool!”

“How can you even understand how that stuff works?”

Joe ate his sandwich in nodding appreciation of the clamor directed toward him, unable to answer the dozen questions tossed his way. He found it hard to eat and smile at the same time, but maybe it wasn’t such a horrible problem to have for once.

He jogged all the way home from school that day without trying to meet classmates from his neighborhood to walk with. Panting, he slammed through the front door and called out that he was home, still wide-mouth grinning from the day. His mother appeared from the fireplace around the corner and scolded him for not shutting the door.

“How was school today?”

“Good, we talked about what we wanted for Christmas this year!”

She turned a concerned eye toward him as she rubbed the soot from her hands.

“In school you did?”

“No, at lunch,” Joseph chuckled, “but Mary wanted new clothes and Susan wanted candy – well, I think we all wanted candy –” at the end of his breath, he couldn’t help but giggle away the last wisps of air in his lungs.

“Slow down, what did you learn today?”

“I want to be a Tinker!” proclaimed Joseph.

His mother kept rubbing her hands; the soot was indelible.

“Is that so?”

Seeing no reason to stop talking, Joe continued.

“Yeah! I think I know what I want for Christmas, all I want is a clock to take apart and see how it works so I can put it together again until it works!”

His mother’s mouth rose in one corner.

“You want a clock for Christmas? And you told your friends this?”

Joe laughed once. “They were so confused until I told them I wanted to practice being a Tinker! Then Lucy said her dad was a Tinker and wanted the same kinds of things for presents that I do and I think that’s good news, so I want to practice as hard as possible and maybe become a Tinker some day!”

In his excitement, Joe had been bouncing up and down, still cooling down from his half-mile sprint home. His mother watched with great amusement as his loose pants slowly dropped around his ankles without him noticing. She covered her mouth as well as her bony fingers could and suppressed her laughter. 

"I just want to know the little parts of what make such big things like clocks tick or the King's Cannons move." His mother's laughter abated and she set her mouth in a line. Bending down, she re-tied Joe's pants and told him to change into home-clothes.

"Soup will be ready in a few minutes." On his way up to his loft, Joseph took careful notice of the upright grandfather ticking in the corner opposite of the fireplace. His mother prodded him all the way up the ladder when she saw him stalling. She shook her head and ignored the chambers in her mind that filled with dread that her son loved machines. She sighed quickly and checked on the soup.

All through dinner, Joseph planned out loud his self-teaching to become the best Tinker in the country. His mother watched his face carefully; saw the lights illuminating his eyes, casting shadows on his cheeks like Joan's used to. Not that Joseph was any part of her blood, but she couldn't help notice similarities at times. Maybe that's why she fell in love with Joseph at the orphanage. Back when there had been orphanages. The Kingdom abolished all institutions of public aid in favor of the needy's re-integration back into the communities.

"And once I know that well enough maybe I can work on weapons!" Joseph concluded, turning his gaze from the ceiling to his mother.

She answered him with as dismissive a tone as she could compassionately muster. 

"You won't touch one of the King's weapons as long as I'm around." Joseph recognized his overstepping his boundaries with mom, and backed off. He finished his serving of soup, which had been cold for a few minutes already, and left the table with quiet permission.