Beyond the Glass Reef

The salvage market smelled of salt and old copper, of fish drying on racks and the hot breath of men who had lived too long with the sea on their lungs. Morning light threaded between cloth awnings and glinted off brass and glass turned to sea-smooth shine, and Mira walked the aisles like someone following a memory the way others followed maps. She kept her hands loose at her sides, fingers curved as if she could feel the outline of a missing thing and press it back into place.

She had learned to read the market the way other people read faces. A cracked compass face might mean the owner had been far; an oilskin jacket fresh-stitched at the elbow meant someone had only last year learned to mend what storms took. Here, in the shallow stalls stacked like driftwood—broken hull ribs hung in rows, coils of rope with faded knots, jars of preserved sunlight—people traded in more than metal and cloth. They traded days.

The fragment lay on a bed of black sea-sand at the center of a vendor’s display: a bit of reef glass no larger than the palm of Mira’s hand, facets sharp and honeyed. Around it the light did something that made passersby stop. From inside the shard a thin slice of morning light stitched out into the air, a shimmer that moved and breathed like a thing alive. It was not a reflection but an image, folded in on itself: a quay, a low-hung sun, a boy throwing a stone and laughing as it skipped toward a boat with a painted blue prow.

Mira’s mouth went dry. The laugh belonged to Tomas.

For three years after he had gone—vanished into the outside shoals one tideless night when the reef held like a closed fist—she had learned to carry the hollow of his absence like a pocket she kept turned inside out. Sometimes the memory reached her like a tide, a small hand slipping from hers at the market edge, a stolen ribbon, the smell of sun-warm rope. The shard showed not only a face but the exact uneven slat of the quay where he had once tied a toy boat; the chipped blue paint of the prow belonged to the very vessel he had loved.

Around the stall a small crowd gathered. The vendor, a woman with a voice like knuckled wood and a forehead stitched with salt-lines, let the image play and watched faces for who would pay. Mercantile hunger sharpened in the market like a blade. A man in a rough coat stepped forward, his boots clapping against the boards. He was careful and blunt in the way men who had bought dangerous things were: quick with money, slower with questions, eyes like flat stones.

He offered a price that made the vendor’s jaw move, a handful of coin heavy enough to silence argument. For a breath the shard’s light trembled, as if considering the transaction. Mira’s chest felt a small electric pain—a hope she had learned to name and then hide. She moved an inch closer; the crowd parted for the buyer as if the tide itself made way.

Then the world split.

A hand shot through the air like a knife. The buyer crumpled, blood bright and quick as spilled reef juice, a ragged cut across the throat. Screams fluted up like gulls. People dropped or dove for cover. The vendor’s face folded into something old and fierce, then shock. The shard toppled, spun in the sand, and someone—fast as saltwind—snatched it up. The thief was half lost in the press, a blur of dark fabric and a satchel that thumped against a hip as they ran. A courier’s gait: quick, lithe, practiced. Mira saw the strap flash a small metallic catch as they moved under the awning, a catch shaped like a wave, thin and stylized, hammered into a crescent of silver.

She saw the mark because she had seen it before, in the edges of shipping manifests shoved under doors, in the collar pins of men who moved freight behind closed gates. The mark belonged to TideWorks.

The market reeled. Guards ran toward the body. Shoppers scattered, clutching wares. Mira did not move immediately; she stayed where the image of Tomas had been projected into the open air, as if the shattered scene could be put back together if she waited. The fragment’s light had been snuffed as a hand closed over it. For a second, before the thief vanished into the alleys that smelled of oil and laundry, Mira had the shape of the runner’s back burned into her eyes: a nervous set of shoulders, quick steps, the flash of that small silver wave clasp.

She had not meant to follow. She had not planned to cross the market line in the chaos where blood still slicked the boards. But the sight of that clasp—of a corporation’s tidy mark on a thing that held his laugh—made her move with a certainty that felt older than fear. Tomas had been gone for three years. No one else had offered answers. The shard had given one obvious lie and a single truth: someone powerful had been hunting for pieces of the reef’s memory, and now they had pulled one out into the open.