This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
A beloved travelling carnival of clockwork wonders pitches in a hard-pressed frontier town, and its marvels begin failing on cue, the same charming fumble the same way twice, always where the crowd can see. This is the cozy science fiction comfort read about going under the bunting to ask them why.

The crew of the much-mended barge The Marigold come down to Halloway to water the ship and to see Mister Sprocket’s Marvellous Travelling Carnival once before it moves on. It is the show the whole frontier knows: a courtly first-generation showman-automaton and the troupe of performer-machines he gathered out of the Scatter’s cast-offs, gave each a wonder to be, and made into a family. Halloway is a struggling town that scraped its lean year down to this one bright week, and staked all of it on the visit.

Then the wonders begin to fail. The strongman drops its bar at the top of the lift. The fortune-teller talks backwards. The carousel forgets which way the world turns. And the famous Grand Finale is promised each night and given on none. The town feels short-changed, the fair-master sends word up the route, and the circuit’s factor comes down with a strike order ready in his coat and a kindly, mournful verdict: let the great old show be struck with its dignity about it and its automata sold off one by one, before it stands under the lamps and is laughed at. But robot wrangler Roy will not call a machine broken before anyone has gone and asked it what it is doing. A fault has no manners and keeps no time, and these wonders fail on the beat, the same way twice, always where a fumble will be seen and never in the grey unwatched hours. That is not a breakdown. That is an act. So Roy sets down the job he was hired for and steps under the bunting to read a troupe of master illusionists closing ranks around a secret.