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The morning market seeped into Mira Calder like a familiar bruise—half comfort, half unrest. Salt hung in the air, a fine dust that clung to the backs of her hands as she worked the polished brass fittings of a small stabilizer she’d been repairing for old Maren on the east quay. Sailcloth awnings made a patchwork of light and shadow over the stalls, and voices braided together in the sort of gossip that remembered every whispered debt. Mira moved through the crowd with the steadiness of someone who had spent years threading a spanner through the ribs of machines that were older than most island houses; her fingers still smelled of oil and iron even after she’d washed them three times.
Jonas Calder, two years younger with a grin that could tilt a dour man into laughter, was supposed to be at his apprentice bench by the time the market bells clanged. He had the head for sequences—not the muscle of Mira’s hands, but an intuition for patterns, the way a bolt ought to hum once it was coaxed into place. He loved to wander the market for new curiosities; the harbor suited him the way the sea suited the gulls. Mira looked up from her workbench to spot him, a flash of a striped shirt weaving through an armory vendor and a woman hawking preserved kelp.
She found him at the spice stall instead, bargaining fiercely over a mislabelled tin of star-pepper for their mother’s stew. He winked when she arrived, as if he had engineered the whole scene for her benefit. He had the sort of careless bravery that had once climbed the maintenance ladders of the older Anchorholds to peer at their sleeping guts; that curiosity had both gotten him scolded by their mentor and earned him the odd favor of hands that remembered the old rites.
They spoke in fragments about the minor things—repairs, a freight schedule—but the harbor undercurrent hummed with rumors of shifting weather patterns and a new governor inspection fleet. Mira kept one hand on the small stabilizer she cradled in her lap, the other brushing the scar on her wrist she’d acquired the winter she’d first apprenticed. The market around them felt ordinary and fragile, the kind of ordinary that can be uprooted in an instant.