Lattice of the Astraea Gate

Harrier's Rest hung like a comet's scar along the rim of the Halcyon Rift, a knot of metal and lanterns and voices braided across a sheltered cove. Starlight slid off stacked hulls; oil-slick alleys smelled of burned coolant and citrus dust from the spice barges. Mira Kestrel stood on a scaffold two stories above the docks, fingers dark with grease, watching the sky with the patient hunger of someone who thought in coordinates. Her right eye, a pale glass disk veneered with thin circuits, flared when a vessel pinged its approach; the implant translated micro-signatures into ribboned data across the iris. It was how she read the world. She called herself a cartographer because maps were promises kept against the indifferent dark.

Elias Thorne, her mentor, moved like an old tide—steady, unhurried. He had the hands of a man who had traced every star lane between three systems and still remembered the particular notch on a rusted panel beneath a birthmark-sized bruise. He shuffled a slab of tempered polymer on the scaffold railing and unrolled an ancient map fragment. The Lode-star tile lay across his palm, etched with lines that shimmered only when the light struck at certain angles. "They don't make them like this anymore," Elias said. His voice was gravel with soot; he tapped a route that cut through a cluster of blackened dots. "This piece remembers routes the charts forget. Treat it like a stubborn friend. Listen harder than you look."

Mira laughed once, a short sound that belonged to both nerves and excitement. Juno—always getting grease on her sleeve—leaned in from behind a crate, popping a metal casing into place on a widget. "Promises," Juno said, wiping her hands on an oil rag. "You collect them like trinkets. One day they'll collect you back."

The Lode-star tile hummed faintly, a memory-echo under the skin. Across the harbor, lanterns swung like nervous planets and a merchant band hammered a rhythm that competed with the rumble of engines. Overhead, a ribbon of engine flare cut the void: the Echelon courier that brought news and penalties in equal measure. Mira felt the air change; something in the stars had shifted. Her implant flickered as if a finger had brushed its circuitry. For a single, electric breath she saw a corridor of light open where no corridor should be, ribbons converging on a point none had recorded.

Elias watched her. "Maps are living things," he murmured. "If you listen, they tell you what they need. If you don't, they break you."

Mira nodded, pressed her palm against the tile as if against a pulse she could steady. The harbor's noises blurred and the stars outside the harbor's arc seemed to tighten. She felt, suddenly and sharply, a lack—an absence in the charts she loved, as if a page had been torn clean from a bound atlas. Something had been taken or hidden. Elias's face hardened when a scream split the market's music; someone shouted about a flare and then the world couldn't stay still.