Prologue — The Foundry
 
 
The key to the Drafting Room looked like a shard of sunlight. Headmistress Porcelain lifted it from a velvet tray as if it might bruise, then pressed it into Dorothy’s open palm.
 
“What is seen is what is fair,” the Headmistress intoned.
 
“What is seen is what is fair,” the chamber echoed—the Wizard behind his velvet smile; Tin with his hands clasped over the little window in his chest; the Scarecrow already counting ceiling rivets; the Lion tugging his blindfold down, up, down again, practicing neutrality like a posture.
 
Dorothy closed her fingers around the key. Cool. Heavy. Real. She felt the hourglass at her hip hum in reply—its red sand measuring a life she’d promised herself she would rewind.
 
The door unlatched and sighed. The Drafting Room was a hollow in the hill, all brass and soot-gold, with an oval table in the center and racks of yellow vellum coiled like sleeping serpents. Along the far wall, a model that was not yet the Lady of Justice rose in scaffolds: the Wizard’s first sketch for a giant wizard—bellmouth hat, booming hand, a face made for speaking down.
 
Dorothy crossed to it and, very gently, moved the charcoal. “What if power looked like courage instead?” she asked. She traced a lion’s brow where the hat brim had been, eased a blindfold over the eyes, sketched her own body under the head with a sword like a firm comma—not a shout, a sentence. “And what if justice didn’t pretend not to need a heart and a brain?”
 
The Scarecrow looked up from his rivets. “Symbols slip,” he murmured. “You’ll pin meaning to one place and it will crawl somewhere useful to whoever’s in charge.”
 
“Then we’ll varnish it,” the Wizard said pleasantly. “That is the point of varnish.”
 
Tin’s chest made a sound like a metronome breathing. Tick… tick… tick.
 
Dorothy set the charcoal down and stepped to the table. Vellum unfurled: a ring of hoops labeled USE, SETBACK, HEIGHT; a corridor full of copper sprinklers with no pipes; a pavilion of daisies with beds that billed by the breath; a maze of mirrors that smoothed the ugly from your limp and called it healing.
 
“Kindness applied,” Dorothy said, and her pencil fluttered. She wrote it onto the margins next to each punishment. Civility Lesson. Safety Pause. Courtesy Delay. The words brightened the paper like a blush.
 
“I do love a gentle vocabulary,” Headmistress Porcelain sighed.
 
Above the table, a glass cylinder the size of a snare drum hung in a cradle, arteries of wire running to every corner. Dorothy brushed the cylinder and felt the red sand in her hourglass stir. The crude dome engine—the Chronotorium, first draft—thicker than air and greedy for levers.
 
“If I slow time just here,” Dorothy said softly, “people will have longer to compose themselves under stress. Less panic. Less harm.”
 
“Less cost?” the Scarecrow asked.
 
“Costs are how we teach care,” the Wizard replied. “If the lesson is free, people forget it.”
 
Dorothy breathed through the knot that made and pressed the Chronotorium’s test toggle with the tip of her key. The room’s edges softened; motion lengthened by the part of a blink. A syrupy calm laid itself over brass and voice and thought.
 
Tick… tick… tick, Tin’s window said.
 
The Lion tilted his head, listening. “It makes me brave,” he offered (and sounded almost like he believed it).
 
“Good,” the Wizard said, and turned to the racks of brass masks waiting in shadow. “We’ll commission the guard tomorrow. The city loves a uniform. The Monkeys keep order while we build. For safety,” he added, to Headmistress Porcelain, who nodded as if the word were a prayer.
 
Dorothy stood very still in the syrup and pretended she could feel time in her fingers like a ribbon she might untie. “This must look kind,” she heard herself say. “Or it will never hold.”
 
“It will be beautiful,” the Headmistress promised. “That is a sort of kindness.”
 
Dorothy swallowed, and wrote the motto again along the vellum’s clean edge so no one would forget the hymn that let people sleep at night:
 
What is seen is what is fair.