The Singing Gate

The tide climbed the old steps of Port Miray as if it had learned patience from the moon. Lila steadied a curled map against the edge of her drafting table and watched a bead of water slide down the office window, thin as a silver thread. The Water Authority building hummed with fans and printers and the slap of sandals in the corridor. She wore a faded blue shirt with ink on the cuff where her pen liked to rest. On her desk a scatter of translucent overlays glinted, channels and culverts traced in pale green. Outside, scooters rattled past and gulls argued over shrimp shells spilled near the street stall. A sharp, briny scent crept in whenever the door opened. She had grown up inside these smells. Her grandmother’s tea shop used to stand two streets away, before the council bought the row and turned it into a parking lot. Lila could still picture the jars: dried orange peel, black tea, peppercorns, small candies that stuck to the glass in summer. On the wall of the shop hung a photograph of a river festival, long paper fish lit from within, everyone laughing with those bright, reckless smiles people reserve for nights when the river is kind. Her grandmother would say, wiping her hands on her apron, that the river is a person with moods. It remembers. It forgives eventually. If you listen to it, it might even tell you what it wants. Lila listened in her own way. When she looked at maps, she sometimes saw memory. Not visions, nothing grand. Just a tug, a sense that a line wanted to curve a little more, that a forgotten drainage cut had once crossed here. She logged such instincts in pencil and then checked archives, field reports, old engineering notes. It was a small, stubborn way of keeping the city’s ghosts from being paved over. 'You do this your own way, don’t you?' Mateo asked, leaning in her doorway with two coffees sweating in their plastic cups. He wore his white shirt unbuttoned at the throat and had the hurried look of a man always late for something only he could name. 'If by my own way you mean by the book then yes,' Lila said. She was precise when nervous. 'We’re presenting to Rafe Voss at four. He wants clean lines, strong pitch.' Mateo handed her a coffee. 'No romance. He said that.' 'Romance?' 'His word. Apparently flood control should feel like a machine.' Lila turned a sheet so the morning light caught it. Beneath her pencil the Old Quarter huddled on its hummock, alleys wending like river hair. A red circle indicated the school where she had studied multiplication tables while canoes nudged the steps outside. 'Machines break when people forget why they exist.' Mateo’s smile was kind and weary. 'Just… make him see numbers. We need the funding.' The afternoon hazard maps would please any accountant. She knew that. But when she glanced at the cracked window, she caught the ghost of a figure reflected behind her: a woman with hair pinned in a knot, mouth set as if to sing. It was only her own outline, bent by the warped glass. She rubbed a smudge away with her sleeve and the phantom vanished. Behind her, the office clock ticked with the sound of someone chopping carrots. Somewhere below, a child shouted, the call melted into the slap of water as a wave reached the archway. For a moment the city felt like a boat, tethered and creaking, waiting to be told which way to face.