Silas Kade kept his hands busier than his thoughts. The bench in his workshop was a carved island of scars and oil, with iron filings made into a fine, glittering dust by a dozen clipped edges. He worked the way a man reads a language he has long since learned: without stopping, his fingers forming letters of rope and metal. A spliced eye, a tight trochaic tuck, a ferrule kissed by heat until it sang; these were the sentences he spoke aloud in the quiet hours. Outside the narrow window the cliffside hummed — a low, slow music produced by wind moving through the line-cables that stitched the settlements along the escarpment. The sound made people sober and practical; it made him slow. He liked how it sounded against the kettle's tone when the water for his tea reached the exact pitch he preferred.
Tea was a ritual of its own in his place: dried citrus peel, a handful of rations-grade bergamot, and a slug of the molasses they did not export because the traders said it clumped the gums of their pulleys. Little flourishes mattered; the town's markets sold pastries shaped like miniature pulleys for children, and the tug of a good knot felt like turning a pastry inside out and discovering the layers were tighter than you'd guessed. There were things in the world that had nothing to do with anchors and splices — the afternoon bread sellers on the landing who sang off-key while balancing trays; the caravan that came down from the plateau with lanterns of beet-skin and smoke that smelled faintly of cinnamon. Those details steadied him.
He was halfway through a small, impatient repair — rerouting a worn tail-line around a bitten ferrule — when the throat of the workshop's bell coughed a single, precise clang. It wasn't the bell for deliveries; that had a longer, lazy ring. This was a clipped call, the sort of attention-getting tone the settlements used when a matter deserved a craftsman's eye. Silas angled his head, the same way he did when a splice misbehaved and he had to read where the stress would travel. Someone tapped the outer door; the wood thumped like a hand on a hull. Silas wiped his hands on a rag threaded with grease and walked to the door, brisk enough to show he had no leisure, but deliberate in the way of someone who practiced the economy of motion.
The messenger on the threshold was young, hair still tangled with the makeshift twine of an apprentice, cheeks flushed from the climb. Lio, who had apprenticed with Silas last summer and whose laughter had been known to unsettle the more stoic horses along the landing, stood panting, one hand clamping a satchel to his chest as if it contained a particularly fierce bird.
"You rang, Master Kade?" Lio grinned, sheepish and proud in one breath. He always carried that grin like a faulty safety knot: charming but unreliable.
Silas let the smile he seldom offered practice itself and said, "Out of things to tinker with? Or did they finally discover a new way to skip maintenance?"
Lio bristled theatrically. "Neither. Hollowpoint sent a wire-car. They've been missing shipments; the anchor at their east post is creaking like an old oak and people worry. They asked for a linewright. I thought of you." He cocked his head, searching for the reaction he knew had been carved into Silas's face long ago: the one that meant 'I am needed.'
Silas felt the old ledger of duty shutter in his chest. He was careful about needing and being needed: it complicated calibrations. He had declined a call last year, citing protocol and risk, and the memory of that refusal still pricked like an errant burr. He had taught himself to say no when a fix would invite improvisation that might end badly. And Hollowpoint — tucked into a bowl of cliffs where supplies could be as thin as the morning fog — had always been a place that baked its own stubbornness into its people. "How bad?" he asked.