The rain in Paris tasted of coal smoke and wet iron. It lashed against the grimy windows of Lucian Vance’s clockwork shop in Montmartre, blurring the flickering glow of the gas streetlamps outside. Inside, the shop was a sanctuary of rhythmic sanity. Hundreds of clocks—pocket watches, mantelpiece pendulums, towering grandfathers—ticked in a chaotic but soothing symphony. Lucian, a man of thirty with grease-stained hands and eyes aged by the brutal memories of the Franco-Prussian war, sat hunched over his workbench, magnifying glass pinched in his eye, trying to repair a shattered escapement wheel.
The sudden, violent crash of the front door shattering the shop’s harmony made him drop his tweezers.
The bell above the door jingled a pathetic, dying note. The wind howled into the shop, bringing with it the scent of the Parisian sewers and raw copper. A man stumbled over the threshold. He was drenched, his heavy wool coat soaked entirely through, but the dark liquid pooling beneath him on the wooden floorboards was not rain.
“Marcel?” Lucian gasped, kicking his stool back.
Marcel Dubois, the chief structural engineer of the newly built Eiffel Tower and Lucian’s oldest friend, collapsed against a glass display case, sending a dozen pocket watches clattering to the floor. Lucian slid to his knees, catching the older man before his head struck the ground. Marcel’s breathing was a wet, ragged rattle. A massive knife wound tore through his abdomen, the edges of the heavy wool coat stained a deep, fatal crimson.
“God in heaven, Marcel, hold on,” Lucian said, his hands immediately pressing against the wound, the hot blood slipping through his fingers. “I’ll fetch the physician.”
“No time,” Marcel wheezed, his grip on Lucian’s forearm possessing a terrifying, desperate strength. He coughed, a spray of red misting his white beard. “They… they know. The iron…”
“Who knows? Who did this?” Lucian demanded, panic rising in his chest.
Marcel ignored the question, his eyes wide and unfocused, staring at the ceiling. With a trembling, blood-slicked hand, he reached into the deep pocket of his coat and pulled out a heavy object. It was a cube, about the size of an apple, constructed entirely of interlocking brass and steel gears. It was a puzzle box, the kind Lucian himself used to design before the war stole his joy.
“The Tower,” Marcel choked out, forcing the heavy brass box into Lucian’s reluctant hands. “Opening day… the President… thousands will die. You must… stop the mechanism. Only you…”
“Marcel, I don’t understand!” Lucian pleaded.
“The Iron Hand,” Marcel whispered, the light fading rapidly from his eyes. “Trust no… police. Find… the Catacomb Girl.”
Marcel’s body went rigid, a final gasp escaping his lips before he went entirely slack. The symphony of the ticking clocks seemed to mock the sudden silence of the dead man.
Lucian knelt there, frozen, the heavy brass cube cold in his bloody hands. Before he could process the grief, heavy footsteps splashed in the alleyway outside. A gruff voice barked an order in French.
“In here! I saw him enter!”
Lucian looked through the shattered door. Four men in the dark blue uniforms of the Parisian Gendarmerie were charging toward his shop, their revolvers drawn. But something was wrong. The police did not patrol this sector in squads of four, and they certainly didn’t draw weapons for a broken window. Trust no police.
Survival instinct, honed in the muddy trenches of Sedan, took over. Lucian stuffed the brass puzzle box into his leather satchel. He grabbed his heavy wool coat and a heavy iron wrench from his workbench. As the first supposed policeman burst through the door, raising his revolver, Lucian hurled the wrench. It caught the man square in the jaw, sending him crashing backward into his comrades.
Lucian didn’t wait to see if they recovered. He bolted through the curtain at the back of the shop, kicking open the alleyway door. He plunged into the freezing, relentless rain of the Parisian night, a framed man carrying a dead man’s secret, running for his life.
