Brine Hollow woke like a breath, slow and salty. Morning sun lay across the wet planks of the quay, but the light that mattered most to the town came from glass, not sky. Lodepearls hung in iron cages along the piers, small and patient as sea creatures, each one pulsing with a blue-green glow that smoothed the tides and kept the fog from gathering like a hungry thing. Juniper Rook sat on a crate and coaxed a tiny brass gear into place beneath the wing of Fig, her clockwork gull. Oil smelled in her hair, and the gull's feathers — beaten tin, solder freckles, the last laugh of a repaired spring — made a little tick whenever she tightened a screw.
Juniper was ten and had always smelled of wire and salt. People in Brine Hollow said she had a maker's hands, the kind that could tease shape out of metal as if it were clay. Her grandmother Mara kept the little house above the glassblower's alley, and Mara's stories stitched the town's nights together: how the Lodepearls were gifts from the sea, how fishermen listened to the lights like a chorus, how the light made the currents kind. Juniper believed those stories the way she believed gears needed teeth to turn; she believed because she had seen the harbor settle under the pearls' hush and had never once seen a ship lost to the reef.
The quay smelled of yeast and tar that morning because festival preparations were beginning. Sailmakers beat bright cloth into flags; children braided seaweed into crowns; vendors set up stalls of smoked fish and sugar-fried kelp. Juniper hummed while she worked, the tune her grandmother had taught her, and Fig clicked in a small rhythm to match. A boy, Kato, his knees peeled from too-fast climbing, came running with a parcel of rope. He ducked under Juniper's elbow and peered at Fig as if the gull had a secret to tell.
'You lend me a wing?' he asked, teasing.
'Only if you stop flapping your hands like a seal,' Juniper muttered, handing him a spanner. Kato grinned and accepted it like a challenge. Around them, Brine Hollow moved: a wheel of lives with sea-salt spokes. That wheel might have sounded ordinary, but Juniper always felt the town tick with hidden things — currents in the water, tiny economies of favors, the careful keep of light. She kept a small notebook where she drew gears and wrote ideas in the margins. Today, the notebook sat in her pocket like a warm stone. It had the drawing of a tide-catcher she wanted to build and the sketch of a longer wing for Fig so he might glide above the fog. Juniper believed she could make such things; she also believed the harbor needed them.