The Loom of the Weft

The Asteris Beacon hung in the black like a needle through cloth. Inside, light braided itself along panels and seams, and a thousand thin maps leaned against racks like books that had never been opened. Mira Ravel woke to the smell of ozone and solder, to the station’s slow mechanical breathing, and to Patch’s mechanical stutter from the berth beside her hammock. She sat up, fingers lingering on the edge of the woven map that served as both curtain and calendar—days marked in faint burns, months in careful stitches. Outside a window the Weft lay in strands: ribbons of pale luminescence that ships followed across the cold. She knew those ribbons the way sailors once knew tides.

Mira’s hands remembered the mapwork before her mind did. She moved through the Beacon as if following a familiar song—measuring light with a fingertip, tuning a broken sensor until it sang back. The place was half-library, half-workshop. Charts hung like tapestries; devices crowded tables; a brass sextant lay on a bench, corroded at the hinge but polished where fingers had gripped it. In the communal kitchen Juno, the oldest of the mapkeepers, mumbled over a pot of coffee the color of old ink. Juno’s sleeves were printed with tiny constellations, and every time she leaned, her hair threw off a small cloud of metallic dust.

“Morning,” Juno said without looking up. Her voice was rasped by years and laughter. She handed Mira a circuit board the size of her palm. “This one’s started to forget the pitch of its loop. Give it a tune.”

“On it,” Mira said. She took the board like a talisman, felt the faint memory of a star in its copper veins. Outside, a transport shuttled past one of the Weft lanes, leaving a quick wake of light. The Beacon’s observation deck caught those wakes; Mira walked there often to watch traffic. It comforted her, the regularity of lines etched into vacuum. Tonight—no, this morning—one thin lane flickered as if a hand had passed through it.

Patch hopped up to the pane, a bundle of repurposed servos and stitched plating, and projected a soft holograph of the lane. ‘‘Anomalous dampening,’’ it announced in a voice like a dropped gear. Patch’s optics blinked orange. Mira frowned. She had patched dampening signatures before—microscopic faults, scavenger microbes eating at coatings, magnetic eddies in a gas fold—but the tune of the lane was wrong. It didn’t hum like a wounded thing; it was quiet as if someone had covered its mouth.

She noted the time in the log, the ship’s registry she glimpsed in the transport’s wake. Thistle. Cargo manifest: agricultural seed, a child’s toy, a crate of memory-blue for a colony out by Vesh. The Beacon’s screens offered nothing more. “Flag it,” Mira told Patch. “Tell Juno.”

But the Beacon had its rituals; notifications were met by official forms and slow hands. In the small hours of the station bureaucracy moved like a sealed clock, and it would be Juno’s decision whether to send an inquiry or let the council run their routines. Mira’s fingers itched in the half-light. The mapkeepers taught patience like prayer, but patience was a luxury for maps. Where lanes breathed, people moved. Where lanes stilled, people could vanish.