Kyoto, early 20th century. Steam engines conquered this city and stopped there. The smoke never cleared. Neither did the feeling that something got left behind.

Kihachi Sakamoto used to believe in the future. Then his brother Seiroku shipped out to war with their shared catalogue of electrical inventions and never came back. What the war left behind was a young man who had stopped finding reasons to imagine much of anything.

Inako Momokawa does everything right, and it does not help. Carrying hidden grief for her late mother and trapped inside a life built entirely from obligation, she is now being handed off in marriage to Yosuke Mizoe, the powerful heir to a steam engine empire with secrets nobody is supposed to find.