The Girl Who Keeps an Old Furnace

Wanyan Shu kept one hand on the warm metal and one hand on her sleeve, because the little camera hidden there had already been broken once. The old furnace answered her with a chorus of voices, and none of them let her pretend she was safe. Her family name carried a debt the court never stopped collecting, and every clean order she received felt like a trap with silk on top. She could fix broken tools and ruined tablets, but she could not fix the way people looked at her mother’s shame. When the queen offered her a private commission, Wanyan saw a chance to protect the only things left to her: the borrowed royal hairpin in her fan, the repaired camera, and her right to keep her own hands on ...