The Meridian Echo

In the translucent ribs of the Glass Bazaar, morning arrived like a chord struck against the hull. Thin rays threaded the transparent plates and shivered across crates of salted seaweed, salvage motors and jars of fossilized light. Vendors tuned their wares the way a luthier tunes strings; the market's low murmur folded into the ordinary music of the station — a familiar rhythm Alio Vhara had learned to read as if it were a map.

Alio had always read the station by sound. Where other people traced edges with ink and vectoring programs, he listened. Air shafts hummed in a low held note; maintenance ducts answered in bell-like overtones; the grave corridors behind the Curio Museum sang in harmonics that meant cold and unlit. When the Meridian Spindle pulsed beneath the museum's dome the whole station settled into a slow golden cadence that kept hover-barges level and streetlights steady. The Spindle was not an engine in the way people liked to name engines; it was a promise — an accord between mass and void and a city that refused to fall apart.

He was twenty-two, with skin like a map and a dozen faint scars across the palms that made it hard for him to hold a braided filament without feeling the history of other hands in it. His notebooks were messy with musical shorthand: little bars and dots and arrows that only Alio could play on the air. It meant little to most. The Corporates sometimes came, looking for impossible passages to skirt customs grids. Alio said yes too often and took the jobs he could; at night he walked the docks listening for the routes that nobody else heard.

That morning the market's chord splintered. The Spindle's note — a low, steady heartbeat under everything — wavered and then cut. Lanterns flickered; a cargo barge spun an awkward arc, then righted itself with a grinding complaint. Laughter broke into a dozen frightened sounds. Somewhere in the museum there was a hard, hollow thud, like something letting go. The curators' glass dome shimmered and then cleared. People shouted the word "Spindle" as if speaking it made it return.

Alio felt the absence like an empty string. Where a harmony should have been there was nothing but space: hollow, cold. Without thinking, his hands went to the battered satchel at his hip. He moved toward the museum because that was what the music asked him to do.

At the museum steps he found the plinth bare. Fingerprints looped in dust, a tiny cable of braided light snipped clean at the end and hanging like a dropped cord. A smear of oily black — spilled star-ink — trailed toward the lower concourse. Mira Joss, the curator, gripped the rail, her knuckles white. Her eyes were rimmed in tired kindness.

"We had shutters engaged," she said. "Locks—"

"We had nothing," someone shouted. People pushed and crowded and the rumor collected like static.

Alio crouched and touched the filament. It answered with a memory: not the Spindle's deep song but a thin, urgent key, like a ship's lace pulled tight. He had never felt that note in his maps. It was a trace left deliberately for somebody who would hear it. He pocketed the filament as the Bazaar's heat pressed against his back and made a decision he had not let himself make before: if absence could sing, he would follow its tune.