The Loom of Falling Stars

Asha Iri woke to the low thrum the city kept like a secret heartbeat. It came through the walls of her workshop as a tone beneath the kettle's hiss, as if the spine of Spindle itself sighed and settled between waking and work. She sat up on the narrow bench and listened, fingers finding the dented ring she always wore when calibrating a weft. The ring was cold, copper rubbed thin by years of touch, and it steadied her hands the way a musician steadied strings.

Her window was a slit that looked out over Tier Seven, where morning fog pooled like silver ink. The tiers of Spindle rose in jagged terraces shadowing one another: gardens woven around steel ribs, market terraces bulging with hanging sacks and lamps, and bridges like ribs between ribs. The air tasted faintly of iron and fermented citrus from the back-stall pickles below. An early tram hummed through its line and a gull-synth spiraled, a metal bird that chirped with a patch of recorded gull-calls and a battery low enough to complain.

Asha dressed quickly in the patched harness she kept for calibrations, its webbing threaded with thin conductive threads she had grafted herself. The harness smelled of solder and lemon oil. M4, her maintenance drone, blinked awake on the table, a squat cylinder with a face like a brass clock and two soft manipulators. It rolled toward her, made a small mechanical chirp, and projected three faint blue lines that danced across her palm. She laughed, a short careful sound.

'You want the kettle first, or the weft?' M4's tone was a sequence of clicks and modulated pitches Asha could read more by rhythm than by words.

'Weft,' she said, tying the harness strap. Her voice startled a neighbour on the stair. Outside, a child's cry launched the day into motion. The workshop smelled of hot metal and vegetable stock. She checked the splices she had left overnight: a micro-lattice of fiber and old-world filaments, small nodes that sat like beads on a string. Someone walking beneath whistled a bar she could not place, and it made her think of her father who had whistled while he braided anchor-line.

On the workbench the loom-reader hummed faintly, a narrow strip of glass that translated the city's gravity into color and pulse. The colors were subtle as dawn—deep indigo that meant calm, a thin copper thread that meant a slight pull near the western ribs. Asha cupped the reader in both hands like a child holding a familiar toy and watched the display. The pattern looked right to the trained eye, the rhythm predictable in its folds. She breathed in the steam of the kettle and, for a measure, felt comfortable in the day already shaped for her.