The Latticekeepers

Junah learned the city's rhythm by touch long before he could read its skyline. He could tell a rebalance in the Lattice by the way a handrail hummed under his palm, by the cold of a comm hatch that had lost its ghost current. In the morning light that slanted through the broken prisms of Sector Aster, the threads of the Lattice lay like a net of pale ropes suspended over terraces and alley gardens. Sometimes they sang — a quicksilver chorus that set the air in motion and made the algae ponds glint like polished coins. He had the smell of that song in his clothes: ozone, oil, the sweet tang of fermented kelp from street stalls.

He was twenty-four and a Loomrunner, which was less romantic than it sounded and more dangerous in small, precise ways. His hands were callused where wire braided into skin. His thrumbar — a stripped, heat-shocked instrument with three worn notches — fit into his palm like a second pulse. He could feel a node's mood through it: a stiffening, an acidity, a yearning to pull threads back into place. When the Lattice sang, the city remembered its shapes. When it stopped, corners forgot how to hold themselves and memories slurred into static.

Junah's apartment overlooked a tangle of service lines and the shared vertical garden of his block. Mira, his neighbor, had left a pot of tomato vines on the sill; the vines drank the micro-hum like a prayer. Her voice threaded through the open cut of the wall, bright as the kettle she was boiling.

— You taking the 7A loop today, Jun?

— If the loop still wants me, he answered, tightening a bolt on a seam that had come loose overnight.

She laughed. Her laughter was the ordinary thing that made him steady. Ordinary was a scaffolding he had built his life around. Beyond ordinary, his younger sister Ellie practiced scales on a battered synth at the communal plaza; she wanted to be a dancer in the aerial teams that stitched banners to the Lattice during festivals. Ellie could arrange her limbs to catch the Lattice's minor pulses and make them look like choreography. Junah kept his toolkit inside his jacket and the small brass charm that had belonged to their mother hidden beneath the lining. The charm was warm against his ribs, a reminder of steadiness.

He crawled into the maintenance crawl at dawn, grease under his nails, lungs tasting of metallic dust. The shaft smelled like old rain and static. A strip of fiber ahead glowed faintly, its color off by a shade he had learned to mistrust. He traced the seam with a fingertip and felt a blank where the hum should be: a cold, a small absence. The thrumbar registered a hiccup and then nothing. A tiny repair drone that had been scuttling along the rail vanished midstride — no fall, no collision, only a smear of cold air and the faint impression of a paw print left on a lint patch. Junah's breath hitched. Silence was never just silence here; silence ate edges.