Lumen Compass: Threads of the Ember Loop

Mira kept her hands stained with the harbor's taste: oil, hot solder, and sea-salt from the orbital mists. The workshop smelled like that at dawn—tinned coffee gone bitter, warm alloy, and the faint, electric perfume that rose off capacitors. Light came through the porthole in slats, each band carrying a different star. They painted the cramped walls in stripes of blue and brass. She tightened a braided cable at the entrance to an old salvage drone and listened for the small, stubborn heartbeat of its gyro.

Outside, the Ember Loop shifted like a living necklace. A thousand platforms hung from a ring of dying comets and woven tethers; some spun slow, others flashed with colony lights. Trade lanes crossed those lights in lanes of silver, guided by a single instrument that all of the loop depended on: a low, humming globe set at Harbor Station, called by everyone the Lumen Compass. It sat in a glass vault two platforms down, a thing of polished brass and translucent crystal, with a rhythm like a slow pulse. When it sang, the lanes held. When it sighed, ships skimmed but nothing tore.

Mira could tell the Compass's moods from how her own hands trembled during a repair. She had been born beside its hum; her mother charted cargo manifests by it, her father steered freighters along its quieted lanes. She knew the harbor's every stubborn screw, the map of rust in the walls, the way gull-drones liked to nest beneath the transit gantry. She was small in the loop's economy—a harborwright who patched the hulls of cheap runs—but she had the sort of fingers that found truth inside machinery. They moved like memory.

Her friend Iko came in on a noise of clipped boots and laughter, cheeks flushed from a run of courier work. He tossed a braided rope across a workbench and leaned over to pick a rag. "The market's been loud this morning," he said, watching her. His eyes were a quick green; he had a laugh that caught in his throat when he tried to keep a secret. "They say the Ascenders are hiring guards for something big. You've heard?"

Mira looked up, palms black with grime. A small smile crossed her face, the kind that hid worry. "Rumors are always hiring guards, Iko. Tell me about your run. Did you see the outer gates?"

He sighed and opened his mouth, then stopped. Outside, the harbor bells chimed ten, a layered clatter that normally meant shift change. The sound found a hollow place in Mira's chest—less comforting than mechanical, more like a bone remembering another bone. A second chime followed, an off-tone that did not belong to the usual rhythm. For an instant the workshop listened with them, as though the walls had ears.