There was a tea party happening in the ruins of City Hall.
Cricket Mourn sat cross-legged on the Mayor's former desk, which now teetered on one broken leg like a drunken animal, as rain drizzled through the collapsed ceiling and into a chipped porcelain teacup shaped like a screaming face.
"Do try the eyeball jam," he said sweetly to the guests. "It's not real jam, or real eyeballs, but it's pretending so very hard."
The guests said nothing.
One was a decayed alderman whose mouth had been stitched into a perfect polite smile. The second was a copper automaton shaped like a giraffe with a bowler hat and a monocle screwed into its brass skull. The third was a headless ventriloquist dummy with a tin crown balanced on its shoulders.
Cricket poured tea for each with delicate care, humming a fractured lullaby:
"Kings who lied and queens who bled,
Let's play house and raise the dead…"
Time skipped.
Just a hiccup. A blink. The steam from the teacup rose in reverse for half a second, and the rain on the window froze mid-drip.
Cricket's eye twitched.
"Oops," he whispered, tapping his temple with a bent spoon. "Naughty tick-tock."
He blinked rapidly and looked down at his lap, where the shattered remains of a pocket watch bled glitter onto his coat.
That made three today. If he kept tugging at time like this, he'd start seeing double again—two suns, two cities, two selves.
He hated when that happened.
A click came from the hallway.
Cricket tilted his head. The clocklings had returned.
The first crept in on hands and knees, its body made of doll parts and stovepipe joints. A cuckoo burst from its chest with a screech, then snapped back in.
"Report, my ticking darlings!" Cricket chirped, hopping off the desk and pirouetting once, his coat twirling like a dirty flag.
Another clockling emerged, dragging behind it a sack. Something inside was twitching.
"Already?" Cricket gasped. "You are all so industrious. You'll make Father Time jealous and Mother Chains very upset. But don't fret—she was already upset. That's her secret, you know."
He giggled as the sack was dropped before him. It moaned.
"Oh, do open it," he said to the giraffe with the monocle. "I'm ever so curious what sort of rotten peach we've caught today."
The giraffe remained motionless.
Cricket sighed. "Rude."
He knelt and untied the sack himself.
Inside was a man. Bruised. Middle-aged. Wearing the badge of a city redevelopment officer.
"Oh dear," Cricket cooed. "You look like a weasel wearing a wallet."
"Please—" the man wheezed. "I have a family—"
"Mm. I checked." Cricket tapped his monocle, which showed a flickering projection of the man shaking hands with contractors, signing off on "emergency demolitions," and pocketing bribes that displaced families into the gutters of District 9.
"Your children are at home with your mistress, your wife is at the gambling den, and your real family—your victims—are sleeping in train tunnels."
He pulled out a little wooden judge's gavel and bonked the man gently on the head. "Guilty!"
"W-wait! I didn't—"
Cricket's smile stretched too wide.
"Shhh, shhh, no lies in the playroom. You're going to be a music box.
A loud one."
Thirty minutes later, the man was a part of the furniture.
Literally.
He'd been bound, gagged, and partially integrated into a living chair—his body stitched to gears and wooden limbs, his eyelids wired open. When someone sat, the chair would scream a confession.
Cricket patted the new creation fondly and stepped back, hands on his hips.
"Much better."
From the edge of the ruined building, he looked out over the city—Nocturnia, gaslit and crooked, bleeding smoke and secrets. Thunder rolled in the distance, but the streetlamps below flickered like stars in a polluted sky.
Somewhere down there, men were lying with a smile on their faces.
He would fix them all.
One joke at a time.