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When a gentle gray begins to steal the colors and songs of Harborbright, nine-year-old Lumi, her clockwork seagull Gulliver, and a band of unlikely helpers must follow a humming glass compass into the Monochrome Marsh to find what was lost and teach a lonely keeper how to let surprise back in.
Lumi had a pocket full of glass and a head full of bright plans. In the morning she walked the cobbles of Harborbright with paint on her palms and sea salt in her hair. The market smelled of warm bread and lemon, of seaweed and warm metal from the fiddlers' stall. Old lanterns swung like slow planets above the street, and gulls argued in the sky with voices that sounded like whistles and tiny bells.
At the corner where the baker pressed his breads into the world, Lumi stopped. She watched the dough puff under Mr. Crisp’s floury hands and imagined the bread wearing a coat of blue. "Too silly," she told herself, but her fingers itched for a brush. Mr. Crisp laughed when he saw her staring.
"Painter or dreamer today?" he asked, tapping a powdered cheek. He knew her; everybody in Harborbright knew Lumi. She was the child who mixed colors in jam jars and painted tiny doors on the stones so ladybugs could find homes. When she smiled, a sliver of yellow always seemed to linger at the corner of her mouth.
"Both," said Lumi, and turned away to the shore.
Her grandmother's workshop sat in a crooked house with windows like old eyes. Jars lined the sill in a rainbow that took a week to name. Paints glowed like captured sunrises. On the bench a half-finished clockwork seagull lay on its belly, brass feathers waiting to be wound. Lumi called it Gulliver and pressed her small nose to the cold brass. The seagull's little gears were etched with tiny waves.
"Breakfast, then work," Aunt Mira said from the kettle-side, where steam drew crooked maps on the air. Her hands were steady, her laugh like a bell. She tied Lumi’s scruffy scarf into a hug.
Lumi ate toast with orange jam and listened to the town. Harborbright hummed like a beehive — a soft, friendly noise: the tug of ropes against wood; a child's drum tapping a slow tattoo; the distant chime of the old tide-clock on the pier. Everything had a color and a sound and a place.
By noon Lumi had painted a new sign for the cobbler and fixed a little wind-harp that hung in the bakery window. Children ran past with kites stitched from map paper. A dog with a brass collar barked and tapped the rhythm of its own bell. Lumi’s palms inked with blue from a tiny jar that smelled faintly of starfruit. She thought about tiny doors and big skies and how you could make the whole town sing if you found the right shade of green. Then she heard the first hush.