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Jax Arana, a maintenance diver in a floating city, sees a crisis blamed on his friend. With help from a wry elder and a stubborn drone, he takes on security forces and a ruthless director to stop a catastrophic plan. Under rain and roar, he rewrites the city’s song and finds his place where steel meets sea.
The floating city breathed like a giant animal. Wave converters groaned with each swell, and the decks answered in a deep metallic chorus. Salt hung in the air, tasted on the tongue before the wind pushed it down the corridors between stacked habitats. Jax Arana, twenty-six and all tendon strength from a life in harnesses, slid down a maintenance ladder until his boots kissed the damp steel of a ballast shaft. The walls sweated. Pipes rattled in a rhythm he knew as well as his own pulse.
He clipped a tether to his belt and crouched by a whining valve. Cold sprayed his knuckles as he twisted a spanner. A fin of sunlight knifed through the grate above, scattering into coins on the standing water around his ankles. Below, the city’s underbelly hummed like a choir of whales. On good days the song calmed him. Today it vibrated too tight, too fast.
Rik’s voice crackled through his earpiece. 'You on shaft four? We’re getting chatter from the converters. Might be another surge.'
Jax braced and leaned into the wrench. 'I’m on it. Tell them to hold the load until I finish here.'
'You want me to tell the converters to be polite? You do it. I like my eyebrows.'
He grinned despite himself. The valve jerked, then seated with a heavy thunk. The spray softened to a mist. He wiped his face with the back of his hand and climbed up into the heat and smell of lubricant. Above, a hatch opened onto a narrow service balcony overlooking one of the wave throats: a circular maw where the ocean funneled up through a lattice of vanes and dynamos the size of houses. Jax stood a moment with fingers gripping the railing. The ocean rolled under them, blue turning to iron where the sky reflected off it. Seabirds toyed with the drafts, angling their wings with careless control Jax felt in his bones when he hung outside the city, nothing under him but thirst and air.
He climbed again, into a market level where heat lamps kept greens alive in rows of grow trays. Voices spilled like beads. An old woman bargained over spiced seaweed cakes. Two kids argued over a toy hydrofoil until a vendor fixed them with a glare. Jax stopped at a stall where orange fish flickered in shallow tanks. His sister, Nia, had painted the sign herself, all swoops and bubbles.