Etta Voss kept her bench like a small religion: a line of battered tools, coils of braided filament, a tin of salted lamp oil, and the potted Luma that gave off a sleepy blue pulse whenever the hull around it flexed. The plant's glow was a domestic superstition more than a diagnostic; you could read stress patterns in its leaves the way old sailors read tides. Suds, the laundry drone, hovered at the doorway, wobbling on a patch of loose rotors and reciting guild etiquette at three different octaves as it sorted a pile of patched rags that were not, strictly speaking, rags. When Etta told Suds not to sing the second verse, it did so anyway and then tried to fold her ragged work apron into thirds.
Outside, the Dock Cluster smelled of fried kelp and diesel-spark, a rich, teetering perfume. Laundry lines hung between masts like festive pennants, each garment drifting in micro-tide winds that made shirts and skirts waltz in a small private choreography. Vendors called their wares in overlapping rhythms: fermented sunfish wrapped in paper that smelled like sharp citrus, bubble-tea kiosks whose cups floated mid-air on low-pressure stands, a man who sold glued-together windchimes fashioned from salvaged alloy. None of the smells or noises belonged to any great war; they belonged to the ordinary, stubborn, soft life of a port that refused to despair.
Etta threaded a needle the way a person might breathe when the room needs ordering—slow, methodical, deliberate. Her fingers still carried the calluses of years of pulling filament through composite skins; the tip of the braid here, the half-hitch there. When she hummed, it was not melody as much as a work rhythm that locked her shoulder and hip and kept the stitch even as the ship’s hull shuddered in the swell. A child’s voice pressed to the skylight, soft and incredulous: “Why do you sing to metal?”
She did not look up. “I don't sing to metal,” she said, “I sing to where metal breathes wrong.” Her answer was a habitual deflection, part jest and part truth. The child tapped the glass and darted away to chase a paper fish that floated like a bright promise. Etta finished knotting off a tangle of braided filament, then cleaned a tiny burr from a needle point, as if the ritual could make the world hold still. Captain Sera Kade’s message came then, short and unadorned: Ragged Prism needed a visible patch on the market hold. Come now.