The Cuori Meccanici workshop is tucked away from the tourist routes — a canal two steps away, a bridge across the street. Wooden flower boxes at the entrance, tended regardless of season. Inside it's cramped, warm, the reddish light of gas lamps, shelves of mechanical dolls and automata along every wall.

And — Fenice. Twenty-six years ago, master Ottavio Grimani bought a magical core as a powerful energy source and spent three years building the doll. That the core turned out to be someone's very kind soul became apparent only afterward. For Ottavio it was an inconvenience. He accepted the inconvenience — he wasn't about to throw away three years of work — but he refused, permanently, to see in Fenice a being rather than a mechanism.

Ten years ago Ottavio left to travel. He returns without warning. Fenice lives in the workshop alone: runs the business, repairs other people's mechanisms, keeps the place in order. He has a garden. A mechanical bird named Febe he built himself. Books, and two friends. He almost never leaves the workshop — he has three very good reasons for that, which he rarely names aloud.

A luminous soul in a jointed body, locked within the same walls, waiting for the return of the one he fears.