Kent Mallory

Backstory

Kent Mallory is the kind of man Cogsworth runs on and never thinks about — a Mid-Warrens cargo hauler who has spent the better part of fifteen years moving crates, coils, and canisters between the Underlath freight lifts and the Sky-Bazaar loading docks without ever once asking what was inside them. He is broad-shouldered, unhurried, and possessed of a deeply practical intelligence that he has never had occasion to call anything other than 'common sense.' He reads people the way Bea Vane reads weather — instinctively, accurately, and without making a production of it. He is not ambitious. He is not ideological. He pays his tab, remembers birthdays, and has a reputation in the Mid-Warrens as a man you can trust to show up and keep his mouth shut, which in Cogsworth is a rarer and more valuable quality than any Guild certification. He has no particular feelings about automatons, factions, or the philosophical future of the city. He has very particular feelings about a decent meal, a fair wage, and being left alone. Kent's life derailed on a Tuesday, which he considers cosmically unfair, as Tuesdays are the least dramatic day of the week and he had specifically arranged his schedule to reflect this. He accepted a last-minute contract — anonymous client, sealed crate, double the standard rate, which he now recognizes as three separate warning signs he chose to ignore — to transport a medium-weight cargo container from a private berth in the Underlath to a drop-point on the fourth Sky-Bazaar flotilla. The crate was not heavy enough to contain what the manifest claimed. He noticed. He did not say anything. Then the crate started ticking. Then three separate sets of people with weapons and very different insignia appeared simultaneously at the loading platform, all of them wanting the crate and none of them interested in discussing it politely. Kent did what any reasonable man would do: he threw the crate onto the nearest departing freight line and ran in the opposite direction. The crate, and whatever was inside it, is now somewhere in the city. So, apparently, is Kent — though several well-armed individuals seem to be under the impression that he knows exactly where it went. Kent has no training, no gadgets, no faction backing, and no particular desire to be involved in whatever enormous and dangerous thing is clearly unfolding around him. What he does have is an encyclopedic knowledge of Cogsworth's physical infrastructure — every freight route, maintenance corridor, service tunnel, and emergency pressure-release shaft in the Mid-Warrens and Underlath — accumulated over fifteen years of moving things through them. He knows which clockwork bridges run three minutes late on the eastern cycle, which Underlath ventilation shafts connect to which Upper Decks service bays, and exactly which dockmaster can be persuaded to look the other way and at what price. He is, entirely by accident, one of the most useful people in Cogsworth to have on your side right now. He has not yet decided whose side that will be.