Isaac carefully rose from the soft cushions of the broken armchair at the center of Mechaniacal’s shattered device, nearly stumbling over the stuck footrest, and found himself surprised that he didn’t feel any obvious after-effects. No aches or pains, no bleeding from the nose and ears, nothing like that. If it weren’t for his surroundings he would have almost thought he’d imagined the whole thing. A soft ticking from his pocket made him pull out the change-watch, seeing the lines on the face of it jitter back and forth, the continuous ring breaking and reforming in a constant fizz until it finally settled back down, maybe a little bit thicker than before but otherwise showing no influence but the one that pointed in his direction.“Did you get it done?” Sarah called, obscured by the bulk of the chair’s mechanisms.“I think so!” Isaac called back, clambering through the tilted rings to get out, forced to climb in some places and duck in others, squeezing through gaps in now-misaligned bands. “Can’t tell offhand, but if I did it right, it wouldn’t look like I did anything at all.” He wriggled through one last set of dimmed and smoke-filled glass tubes and dropped a few feet to the floor.“Well, we’re all still here,” Sarah said, blowing out a plume of smoke and casting a sideways glance at Mechaniacal, who was studying some incomprehensible readouts at a control panel on the other side of the augmentation mechanism. “So you can’t have messed things up too badly.”“You certainly did something,” Mechaniacal said, looking up from his instruments. “I’m pleased to report it is difficult to tell what, which accords with the intended outcome. Of course, if there is an issue, nothing can be done about it.” He rapped his cane against one of the bent and deformed gears in the defunct frame. “For good or for ill.”“So what—” Sarah started, but was interrupted by an explosion, the ground shaking and rolling like a (...)