Beneath the Spliced Sky

Etta Rowan kept her boots where she could reach them without thinking, a habit formed after too many dawn climbs when the city was still half-dark and the tethers hummed like tired insects. She liked the routine of tape and rivets, the rhythm of testing tension and reading the way a rope sang under load. It was a language that hurt her palms in the best way. On that morning the air had a damp brightness—sea spray carried up from the lower decks and the laundry kites tattered against the air—but otherwise the High Rows looked ordinary: vendors opening canvas flaps, a boy tuning a clockwork bird, a woman balancing a crate of dried fruit on her hip with the practiced shortage of a tightrope walker.

Etta moved through the scaffolds with the easy speed of someone who had forgotten the ground. Her harness fit like a second skin; the carabiners tapped against her thigh. She rode a bosun’s chair out to the span where the trading platform arced, checking bolts and eyelets with the same care she gave to old friends. Her hands smelled faintly of grease and lemon from the dishsoap the neighbors rinsed their pans with, a scent that now meant safety in her mouth.

“Morning, Rowan!” Harlan called from a railing two spans over. He had his mouth full of a pastry that dripped sugary brine into his beard and a grin that suggested he expected the sky to unravel at any moment.

“Don’t lob your breakfast at me,” Etta said, not looking up. She clipped a test line and rapped it with a wrench to measure tone. “If the sky goes, I’m not catching you.”

Harlan made a show of clutching his chest. “I always make a dramatic exit. Keeps the nieces entertained.”

There was a ritual to those mornings that had nothing to do with work: the vendors exchanged gossip, the tea-women stacked their little iron kettles, and a street-singer with a cracked throat tried to sell a song for a copper. Etta liked that hum. It grounded the city in ordinary commerce: flatbreads cooked on iron plates, fermented kelp pickles drying on racks, the way children chased a hoop along a catwalk. None of it belonged to her, but she kept watch over the ropes that let everyone have their ordinary.

At the joint where the main tether met the platform’s ring she found it: a hairline abrasion the color of old bone, threads gone fuzzy as if someone had brushed them with a comb. She crouched, felt the fibers with a fingertip, and frowned. It was not a clean cut; it had worn in a shallow, patient way. She threaded a probe through the sheath and felt the inner core’s roughness give under her nail.

Etta’s body tightened. She checked the neighboring span the same way. Another abrasion, smaller but with the same hesitant geometry—strands thinning as if someone had looped the cord over a stone and left it to wear itself away. A cold sense of misalignment slid under her ribs. These were not ordinary rubs. Someone, or something, had nudged the balance.