Cass Arden had learned to travel light because every knuckle-scraped hand and rusted pulley she'd ever coaxed into doing its duty had taught her what unnecessary weight felt like—on bodies, on schedules, on patience. Her kit was a tight bundle of essentials: a climbing harness that smelled faintly of machine oil, a set of calipers in a battered leather pouch, three different-sized spanners, a leather-bound notebook whose pages were mostly formulas and a single grocery list, and a coil of synthetic rope that had survived two seasons of surf and one overly enthusiastic fox. She shouldered it all and stepped off the skiff into the town's splaying quay with the same brittle sort of politeness she used on contracts: measured, efficient, and blunt.
The harbour fog had a flavor here—more like browned sugar and cold iron than the briny slap she had expected. Vendors sold triangular seaweed pasties and tins of candied sardines under awnings the colour of old paint palettes; a busker tuned a pipe that whistled with the wind and made a sound that locals called a "sea-hum." It was a small, living town clinging to limestone terraces, houses like stacked flutes, each painted some defiant colour so the fishermen could find home through the morning mist. Someone had hung strings of small bells across the alleyways to ring when the fog rolled in; they called that sound the town's alarm and its lullaby, and Cass found, against her own will, that it was oddly reassuring.
She didn't come home for scenery. She came because Rafi's voice had an edge she didn't hear unless things were broken in ways that couldn't be smoothed with money. "Cass," he'd said, not asking. "The span's wobbling again. Mayor wants a stamped plan, but you—"
"I'm not doing an emotional repair," she'd said on the phone in the metal-narrowed bureaucracy of her current life. Cass was good at putting her work in boxes and labeling them with pragmatism: inspection, cost, risk. 'Emotional' wasn't a category. It wasn't professional.
Still, she packed her biggest gloves. Patch, the freelance rigger who had a way of showing up wherever one was measured to be in trouble, met her on the quay with a grin and a crate that rattled suspiciously. Beside him nudged a ridiculous mechanical contraption shaped like a goat. Staples, as Patch insisted on calling the machine, bleated through a speaker when Cass approached; then, for reasons rooted in mechanical curiosity and yet broader absurdity, Staples chomped through a box of spare rivets that had been rattling in Patch's crate. Metal clinked. Patch barked a laugh that sounded halfway between pride and apology. "She only eats the rejects," he claimed. The exhibit of a goat that ate rivets made the market children laugh; an old woman in a seaweed apron pretended to offer it a pasty and received instead a shiny, polished bit of metal as if the goat were some sort of eccentric jeweller.
Cass rolled her eyes and reached for her harness. There was a physics to embarrassment she liked—manageable, predictable. She tightened the straps, felt the harness snug against her chest and shoulders, and walked away from the quay toward the cliff path that led to the walkway. Her boots hit the cobbles in the rhythm of someone who spent a lot of days calculating when a truss would sigh and when it would scream. She walked with that certitude now, as if each step were a calculation and every breath an equation.