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In a fractured skyscape where towns hang by tethers and storms can be owned, young windwright Saela must retrieve a stolen pulse that keeps her harbor alive. With a mechanical companion, stubborn skill, and new allies, she faces a syndicate that trades in weather and returns to mend what was broken.
The harbor of Aerhaven clung to the edge of the world like a ring of mismatched teeth, barges and platforms bolted together by ropes, iron, and stubborn lives. Morning arrived as a silver smear on the horizon; gull-voices, the rasp of winches, and the metallic sigh of canvas against wood filled the gaps between houses. Salt and oil mixed into a thick smell that lived in Saela's hair and under her nails. She worked as if the world were a machine that could be coaxed into better temper: a wrench in her right hand, a scrap of leather in her left, knees stained with oil, eyelashes freckled with metal dust.
Her shop sat under a swaying sail that kept rain off the tools, its sign a faded brass disk where someone had once engraved a stylized gale. Shelves bowed with parts—strips of copper, a half-burnt lens, glass vials that held nothing but promises. Saela liked to think each item had a history and that she was good at reading the small scars. Today her patient was a small sky-sloop's wind-truss: a tangle of ropes and feathered fabric that hummed when she plucked it just right. The hull outside creaked with cargo; a boy’s laughter cut through the air when a bundle of dried kelp landed wrong on a dock.
She moved with compact certainty, tying knots so perfectly they seemed to apologize for themselves. Hands that had learned to pry open stuck screws also knew how to smooth the raw edges of a child's temper. The bell above the door squealed. Ren, who apprenticed with her and whose hair smelled permanently of seaweed and lemon, ducked in carrying a crate.
"You'd have been perfect," he said, dropping the crate and grinning through the small cloud of sawdust. "If perfect involved breaking the sky in three places and swearing at a brass cog." His smile faded when he saw the line between Saela's brows; she kept the same look when a delicate socket refused to seat. There was a rhythm to their mornings: fix, barter, drink bitter tea, go back to fixing. It felt like holding a taut line against wind.
From the water below, someone hailed. A gull tore at a scrap of fish and, for a moment, everything was ordinary. But when Saela walked to the edge of her platform and looked west, the sky held a bruise she did not like. It was thin and violet at first, a seam in the light, but the seam moved with teeth.