Tidebound

Rynn Kade wakes to the sound of gulls arguing with the day. Outside her hatch, the city of Brinegate lifts itself like a layered puzzle: rickety markets on stilts, neon banners that drip light into the salt, the skeletal skywalks where the merchants from upper levels sell their polished things. She pushes her fingers through the condensation on the metal and tastes salt and oil. This is where she lives—on the edge of tides and commerce, in a room the size of a crate, surrounded by scavenged parts and spool after spool of braided wire.

Her skiff, the Skitter, rests with one claw sunk into the mud at the dock. It is a silhouette of scuppered metal and patched plating, patched again, a rumor of paint. Rynn can name every scab of weld on its hull, every slat that creaks when she cuts the engines for a silent glide. She runs her palm along a dent where a barnacle-swarm once bored into polymer. The dent remembers a night three years back when she dove down to the relic fields by herself and came up with a cargo hold full of dead sensors and a living idea: keep moving, keep breathing, keep what belongs to you.

Across the gangway, the market stirs. Fishmongers throw their catch into wire bins; a child tries to sell a cog the size of a coin by pretending it is a charm. The smell of charred kelp mingles with the metallic tang of powerfoam. Voices rise and fall like the tide. Rynn moves through them with practiced steps, nodding where people nod, saving a grin for Mags—dockhand and chronic alarmist—who waves a handkerchief with a flourish and a curse.

Her comm chirps. A voice slides into her ear, clipped and warm.

"Ryn, you got that calibrator?"

"I left it on the table. Don’t burn the lock again."

Jalen’s laugh is half a spark and half a blowtorch. He is five years younger, amazingly stubborn and astonishingly good with a welder. He works at Lockworks two levels up, a place of valves and breath and the steady, secret pulse that keeps Brinegate’s lower tiers from submerging in bad weather. He says he wants to make the locks honest. Rynn says they keep the city's blood moving. They both listen to the city together.

She tucks a strap across her shoulder, checks the Skitter’s intake pumps, and looks once more at the skyline. A plume of steam curls from the tower where Lockworks keeps its heart; a thin ribbon that might mean nothing or everything. The day is ordinary. That thought presses at her like the first chill of a coming storm, and she steps onto the dock with the practiced calm of someone who knows how quickly ordinary can be pulled under.