Tide of Reckoning

Mara's hands smelled of salt and burned solder before the sun touched the cranes. She balanced a weathered crate on her shoulder and let the courier drone, nicknamed Lux, ride the brief vacuum of wind that curled between the shipping containers. Port Rhea never slept the same way twice: tides rewrote the docks, barges rearranged like a slow, indifferent puzzle, and the city's neon hung over the water in soft bruises. Mara liked the instability. It fit the way she kept her life — fast fixes, quick rides, a ledger balanced by tomorrow's jobs.

Her apartment was a sprawl of salvaged tech and childhood drawings taped to the inside of a metal locker. Finn's portrait — a blunt crayon sun and a crooked smile — had held a corner of the shelf for two years. Finn, ten years old with lungs that coughed like an old engine, slept in a bunk beneath a window that shook in winter storms. If Mara had learned anything from the drone races and alleyway deals, it was this: you keep what matters by treating it like a machine you can repair.

"Morning," said Dax, half-hidden behind a bulkhead, hands clasped around a steaming paper cup. He'd been a mechanic, a racer, and when the city got mean, Dax became silence in a corner. His face read like someone who had traded sleep for watchfulness. "You carrying someone else's trouble today?"

Mara tightened the strap and gave a tight smile. "Always. Got a drop to the Neptune Spire. Pay's good. Might finally cover Finn's last tests."

Dax's mouth thinned. "Neptune's an offshore rig. Umbra's presence out there is… noticeable. You sure you want to take risk that high?"

She'd been offered more dangerous jobs before. Mara kept one rule: only one danger per run. This job promised double danger and a clean ledger. "I'm sure. Lux knows the flight corridors. I'll be in and out." Lux buzzed, a compact drone with patched armor and a camera like an old human eye. It blinked a blue readiness light.

The harbor's air tasted of metal and diesel when she launched. The city receded: bridges like rib cages, alleys as veins. She threaded Lux between cranes, skimming low to avoid the coastal patrols. A cargo barge opened a path and Mara let Lux slide above its stacked containers, the crate strapped under its belly.

Out past the breaker, the ocean smelled of cold iron. Neptune Spire rose as a silhouette against a flat horizon — a ragged crown of scaffolding, a hundred levels of cables and catwalks. Security drones orbited like wasps. Mara's chest tightened in the way it did before a race. She set Lux on a steady approach and checked the encrypted manifest again. The crate's seals were intact. The payment had been wired in three hesitant transfers. Finn's name was still there, written in the margin of her ledger as a reason, not a weight.

A flare of white light licked across her HUD. An alarm burred from Lux. A metallic ripple raced through the drone's frame as if someone had run a knife along its bones. Mara swore, palms cold, and fought to steady the controls. Something reached for Lux — a magnetic grappler from a secondary drone, fast and precise. She felt the pull like a physical tug at her ribs. The custom harness flexed; the crate swung. A second drone struck, black and smooth as a shark, and the ocean seemed to close its breath.

From the Spire, a voice fell over the comm: cold, recorded, impossible to human anger. "Courier vessel, state your manifest." Mara's reply tasted like grit. Her HUD showed identification codes flagged by Umbra Security. Her payment vanished from the ledger with a single, clinical line: CANCELLED. The world narrowed to Lux and the grappler and the knowledge that someone had just reached across the water and touched the one thing that could fix Finn.