The Boy Who Wound the Sun

About this book

In the Orrery, every sun is a machine, and Old Saffron is running down. On the junk-moon Tallow, where a day that once lasted thirty hours now lasts forty-one, fifteen-year-old Kit Marrow dives the scrap-trenches for copper and lies about almost everything. Then he digs up a glass bird the size of a sparrow. It is nine thousand years old, unfailingly polite, and it burns the shape of a winding-key into his palm: Kit is the Hand, the one person who can open the heart of the sun. On rich Meridian, the priestly Horologe has spent seventeen years raising a different Hand, and its Regulator will not give up her daughter's destiny to a scrap-boy from the rim. The tides are failing. The light is stuttering. And the boy who haggles over the truth has thirty-three days to sail into a dying star.