Always at dusk, Anna slipped away, climbing the factory’s sawdusty stairs to the empty top floor, cradling her clockwork creation and a key.

She’d open a window and lean far out, the cool air ballooning her lungs like sails. She’d wind the bird until it twitched, desperate to be free.

‘Find a home,’ she’d whisper, kissing its head of silken wood before letting it go.

Hours later, the bird would appear at her dormitory window, labelled with a new defect, and the women, cosy in their beds, would snigger.

Using offcuts of wood and metal, and forgotten gears, Anna would spend every off-the-clock moment crafting a better bird. While chiselling her tenth, she’d caught handsome Lev’s eye. By her thirtieth, she’d enjoyed his kisses. By her fiftieth, he’d said, ‘Marry me, Anna. Let me give you a home.’

She knew Lev would also give her children, and she’d love them as much as she loved him, and their lovely family would steal her soul.

‘I’ll stop at 100 failures,’ she promised, aching for him but also for a buyer and her shop of glorious, mechanical birds.

Tonight, a crowd waited by the window.

Lev smiled at her final creation. ‘Fly well, my rival.’

Anna turned the key in the bird’s throat, setting its copper wings flapping as fast as her heart. It sprang from her hand, swift and true.

After an agony of waiting, the bird returned, a confused moth in the dark, its label a noose.

Anna read the one-word answer through tears:

NO.

The women laughed. Lev shushed them.

‘It is better being assemblers, Anna. No errors. No failure.’

And nothing new. Nothing unique. With each bird, Anna had carved, sanded, engineered and polished herself.

‘You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘I must make more beautiful mistakes.’