Steel Current

The Basin smelled like old batteries and sweet algae when Lina pulled her hood low and stepped onto the makeshift plank that connected Market Row to the next raft. Salt spray stung her lips, diesel smoke crept under each canvas stall, and the city’s lamps blinked in a slow, uneven rhythm as if someone were breathing through a faulty lung. She moved with a practiced economy of motion—hands quick, knees steady—balancing a crate of scavenged servos on one shoulder, a clipped map of flooded alleyways folded against her thigh. Voices rose and fell like gulls: vendors hawked grilled kelp and soldered trinkets, children chased each other with spare propellers, and a radio high in the market hissed a late announcement about dwindling pump credits.

Lina’s fingers remembered every friction point on the plank, the places that snapped, the rusted bolts you could catch if you jumped wrong. She’d grown twin calluses on her palms from years of hauling, from pulling dead motors out of the dark water where they sank like little iron graves. Her apartment—one room above a garage that smelled of oil and lemon—was under the smallest resonant dome she could afford; her mother slept with thin curtains drawn against the drone light because hydro-alarms made her hands shake. Lina kept a collection of small things: a cracked wrench with clog marks, an amber lens from a transit drone, a chipped plastic bird that chirped two different tunes. Those things were quiet proof that she could make things run again when the city blamed the storms and moved on.

The market hummed with its own life. Lina bypassed a patch where a busted pressure pump hissed and steamed. A boy with a face like an old coin pressed a tin cup into her hand—every hand got a coin from someone today because everyone thought the pumps might give next week. Lina dropped a handful of salvaged wiring into a vendor’s tray, bartering for a battery pack and a data slate. She kept an eye on the canal. The water looked ordinary enough—black glass in the midday—but she watched the surface tension in a way that made people call her obsessive. Currents could betray you with a small sideways pull; a sluice could throw up a gust of oily mist that smelled like old soup and memory. She saw movement near the dock: a maintenance skiff cutting the water close to the corporate piers, lights like eyes. Security drones hovered above it like bored bees. Lina tightened her grip on the crate. There, tangled in a patch of drift, something small glowed green and blinked once before going dark. She reached in with a hand that did not tremble and pulled out a broken courier beacon, its casing scored but its core intact. The green pulse under her palm felt like a heartbeat.

'Where’d you get that?' asked a voice by her elbow—Jule, hair braided with strips of reflective tape, fingers stained with ink where she’d been patching antennae.

'From the water,' Lina said. The beacon was warm. 'It’s got a signature like the city maps. Maybe still linked.'

Jule’s grin was immediate, sharp, hopeful. 'That’ll fetch—' she stopped when a distant horn cut through the market. The sound vibrated the metal racks. People froze; a ripple went through them like the current kinked itself. Up on the corporate pier a line of armored personnel carriers eased out. They moved with the slow, inevitable thrust of something that rarely had to worry about tides. Lina frowned. The carriers bore the clean emblem of Halden Engineering. Halden kept pumps running in the Dry Quarters. Halden kept doors closed.

Lina folded the beacon into her jacket. The city had ways of swallowing the small lights that tried to glow in it. She kept walking.