The Clockwork Governess - A Curse, an Airship, and a Wizard Who Irons His Own Cravat

She Built Something That Could Save Thousands of Lives. Someone Decided It Was More Useful as a Weapon — and Turned Her Into Someone Else to Make Sure She Couldn't Stop Them.

Wilhelmina Voss spent ten years building the Hollow Engine - a clockwork mechanism designed to replace the dangerous steam boilers killing factory workers across three empires. It was the most important thing she'd ever made. It was also, as it turned out, the reason a witch cursed her into the body of a sixty-two-year-old woman and left her running for her life through the streets of Greymarch with nothing but a satchel, a stolen invention, and the single worst Tuesday of her career.

She falls - quite literally - through the engine room hatch of the Meridian, the most poorly maintained airship in three empires, captained by the most wanted alchemist-for-hire in the same three empires: Caspian Holt, who is vain, theatrical, devastatingly charming, and, as Billie will spend the next six weeks discovering against her better judgment, considerably more decent underneath all of it than anyone who knows his reputation would ever expect.

She needs to break the curse. He needs someone who actually understands his ship. Neither of them needs what's clearly, inconveniently, inevitably happening instead.

But the witch didn't curse Billie out of spite. Curses this precise - this carefully commissioned, this deliberately targeted — don't happen by accident. Someone paid for this. Someone who knew exactly what the Hollow Engine was worth, exactly what Billie could prove, and exactly why she needed to disappear before she got the chance to prove it.

As Billie gets closer to the truth - between Ministry inspections she talks her way through, midnight conversations on the observation deck that say considerably more than either of them intends, and the growing, terrifying suspicion that the charming captain she's been arguing with every morning knows more about her curse than either of them is ready to survive - the picture assembles itself into something worse than she imagined.

The weapon built from her stolen invention is already being deployed. The witch is already watching the ship. And the man Billie has been slowly, disastrously falling for is carrying a secret that connects him to the curse in a way that will cost both of them far more than a broken heart - if it doesn't cost them everything.

She came aboard this ship to hide. But what happens when the only person who can help her is the one she should never have trusted - and the only way to save thousands of lives is to walk alone into the enemy's stronghold with nothing but her own brilliance, a single impossible gamble, and sixty-two-year-old hands that have never once, in her entire life, built anything they weren't absolutely certain would hold?