Tide of Keys

The market on Dockside Three smelled like iron and lemon oil, like frying fish and the warm musk of a battery that had been recharged too many times. Lanterns strung between shipping cranes cast bands of gold across the slick planks; voices layered into a steady machine hum. Juno Reyes moved through it the way a current moves through kelp—deliberate, weaving, finding the path that took the least resistance and the most speed. Her left arm was a matte of brushed alloy and soft polymer, the seam where metal met skin still a map of faint white scars. She flexed it without thinking as she threaded between a vendor selling boiled seaweed and a boy balancing a crate of contact gels. Her fingers registered the micro-vibrations of the wooden boards; the arm translated them into an instinctive rhythm she trusted more than her feet.

She was delivering a package—small, humming in its foam cradle— labeled in thin red script: MED/RELAY/URGENT. Orders came through her courier node with the blunt clarity of law: get in, get out, don't look at the faces. That creed stretched until it snapped when she felt a hand—small, warm—slap her sleeve.

"Jun—" Kea's voice cut like a bell. Her sister stood under a drooping tarpaulin with hair damp from the harbor mist. Kea was sixteen and had her mother's stubborn mouth, and she looked at Juno with a mix of fright and something else; a quickness, the kind that always preceded trouble.

"You're late," Juno said, but there was no bite to it. She checked the crate and slid her free hand into her pocket for a spare coil of fastening wire. Kea's eyes flicked toward the tide towers that floated beyond the market, a cluster of ribbed columns breathing slow, deliberate light into the night. One of the towers pulsed oddly, then stuttered—the glow paling, then flaring. For a fraction of a second the whole face of the harbor looked bruised.

A low siren began somewhere inland, a sound like a throat clearing. People glanced at each other and then continued—with market economy, worry is currency, and no one wanted to lose their wages to a noise. Juno hooked the package under her arm. "I'll check the relay. If it's the core tangle, don't—"

Kea's hand squeezed her sleeve. "Don't go alone."

Juno blinked. She had been a current-runner long enough to know that alone or together changed the rate of danger, not its existence. "I always get back," she said. Her voice was small in the open market, and neither of them believed it. She moved away toward the narrow path that ran the length of the tidewalks: planks bolted to girders, lights, and a rail system for the courier skiffs. Water hissed beneath the boards; a film of salt rose in the air and settled on everything like gossip.