The Arena Between Gears

CHAPTER ONE

The Arena floated impossibly between two halves of a severed city—a game show built from iron bones, glass eyes, and ceaseless machinery. Contestants stood on their allotted platforms, each one cast in a jaundiced spotlight that flickered with the rhythm of distant pistons. Somewhere beyond the smoke-stained girders yawned an abyss; below them, nothing but a bottomless night.

Of the six players, only Eleanor could see her breath.

She pressed her palm to her chest—heartbeat steady but racing all the same. She remembered tucking Daisy’s hair behind her ear that morning, promising she’d be back soon. Now she clung to that memory like a lifeline while strange hosts whispered rules into her earpiece: "Isolation begins now. Each round strips away another layer."

The first challenge arrived in a fog of hissing steam: assemble an automaton child from scattered brass parts. Eleanor’s hands trembled as she fit gears together, her mind flashing to Daisy’s toy box at home—full of dolls missing limbs and stuffed animals patched with love.

As she worked, something soft brushed her wrist. She glanced down: among the metallic debris lay a familiar box of cotton swabs, double-tipped and pristine white against the grime. It felt almost profane here—a remnant from normality. She pocketed it without thinking, unable to explain why.

Across the arena, another contestant—a broad-shouldered man named Wilfred—fumbled as oil dripped from his automaton’s eyes. He wiped his brow with a trembling hand. “If only we had something softer…” he muttered.

Eleanor hesitated before tossing him her box across the chasm between platforms. Wilfred caught it; relief flooded his face as he used the swabs to gently clean away the oil pooling around his creation’s delicate clockwork sockets. His voice carried—a whisper meant for himself but audible in the hush: “Reminds me of cleaning Thomas’ ears after bath time.”

The moment was painfully human amidst the absurdity.

The game show host’s voice crackled overhead: “Intermission.” The platforms spun apart; Eleanor’s space contracted until she sat alone on a mechanical island barely wider than her chair.

No windows. No audience applause—just gears grinding underfoot and emptiness all around.

She clutched her knees to her chest and stared at the half-empty box now returned by Wilfred via a pneumatic tube. What she wouldn’t give for Daisy’s sticky hugs or the mundane chaos of bedtime routines—fingers sticky from jam, tears over imaginary monsters under beds. She ran a cotton swab across her eyelid, mopping up mascara streaked by silent tears.

A buzzer sounded; new instructions unfurled across an overhead ticker:

“Cleanse yourself before entering Memory Round.”

Water trickled from unseen pipes into a tin basin bolted to Eleanor’s platform. She dipped a cotton swab into it and cleaned behind her ears—a gesture automatic and soothing as breathing—a ritual she’d perform on Daisy before Sunday services or school picture days. The simple act steadied her nerves; she caught herself murmuring lullabies under her breath.

One by one, contestants were summoned into glowing glass booths for Memory Round—a challenge so abstract it defied explanation until you lived it. In hers, Eleanor was confronted by shifting visions: Daisy asleep under patchwork quilts; Daisy running through foggy fields; Daisy calling for her mother through static-laced speakers.

Isolation pressed in hard—the kind that had nothing to do with distance and everything to do with losing your place in someone else’s world.

When Eleanor emerged from the booth—sweat-dampened but still holding tight to her swabs—the host smiled thinly from beneath his top hat. “Objects persist,” he intoned. “Even when memories falter.”

Wilfred approached her during another intermission, holding out a bent swab like an olive branch. “Thank you,” he said simply. “We’re not allowed many comforts here.”

Eleanor nodded; they stood together in silence as gears ticked down another round.

By dawn—or what passed for dawn under gaslight lanterns—the final task was revealed: write one letter home with whatever remained at hand.

Eleanor tore off part of the cotton swab box for paper and used one stick as a makeshift quill dipped in soot-water ink. Her message was simple:

Daisy, Even here I remember you—clean ears, soft cheeks, and stories told between machines. Love, Mum

As she sealed it with trembling hands, Eleanor realized that sometimes survival meant clinging not just to hope or courage—but to small rituals repeated in ordinary moments: cleaning ears after baths; wiping away tears before they fell too far; sharing tiny comforts when all else seemed stripped away by distance or design.

Above them, gears reversed direction and spotlights flickered out—one by one—as if even the Arena recognized that isolation could never truly erase what was built on love.