Annoy -

Elias gripped his tweezers tighter. Focus, he told himself. He lowered the hairspring into place. Wheeze-puff. Wheeze-puff.

The hairspring, a coil thinner than a human eyelash, had Ping-Ponged out of the tweezers and vanished into the shag carpet. Elias sat frozen. The annoyance he had been carefully tamping down suddenly flared into a cold, white heat. Elias gripped his tweezers tighter

He had only been searching for five minutes when a small, rhythmic sound started up from the street outside. A car was idling, its bass-heavy music thumping a single, repetitive note that shook the very glass of his storefront. Wheeze-puff

"No," Elias whispered, standing up. "It is the slow, methodical erosion of another person's sanity. It is a whistle that doesn't know its own tune. It is gum that sounds like a wet boot in a swamp. It is the destruction of a three-thousand-dollar hairspring." Elias sat frozen

It wasn't a melody; it was a rhythmic, airy wheeze-puff that seemed to emanate from the next room where his new apprentice, Toby, was ostensibly cleaning the workbench. It was the kind of sound that didn't just reach the ears; it vibrated against the teeth.

Toby stopped mid-whistle, his cleaning rag frozen. "Uh, like when my sister hides my phone?"

As Toby scrambled out, he accidentally kicked the doorframe, making a sharp thud that echoed through the silent shop. Elias sighed, reached for his magnifying loupe, and began the long crawl across the carpet.