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In a floating city held aloft by a bioluminal Lantern, a careful twenty-year-old apprentice must track down a stolen 'heart' and confront a syndicate that would sell light. With a gifted device and loyal companions, he learns that repair is a communal choice.
Aster woke like a carefully wound watch: slowly, with a series of tiny, inevitable clicks that ran through its ribs. The city was a stacked thing—catwalks crisscrossing like the hands of a dozen clocks, barges tethered along the low decks, and the Lantern tower rising at the center like a rib cage stuffed with light. Lio kept his windows open to the noise because sound taught him how the city felt. He could tell when a belt was starting to slip by the way dust changed its rhythm, or when a valve wanted oil by the hush that followed a steam hiss. Small things, precise things, mattered the way salt did in soup.
His workshop smelled of lemon oil and solder, with an undercurrent of damp ropes from the quay. Tools hung on pegboard in neat rows; each tool had a place and a story. A half-built pocket-lantern lay in a vise, its tiny filaments coiled like roots. Zip, a courier pigeon fitted with a brass neckplate and an attitude, hopped along the windowsill and made a noise that Lio read as impatience. "All right," Lio said aloud, turning a ratchet. "We'll be done in time."
Lio had the steady hands of someone who had been taught to wait. At twenty, he felt slightly too used to the shape of his life: apprentice-to-Mara, turner of cogs, mender of the city's less glamorous aches. Mara, who had a laugh like a dropped gear and a tolerance for mischief, ran the little crew of keepers that watched the Lantern's auxiliaries. People called Lio careful; he liked the word because it meant attention. It also kept the edges of fear at bay.
Outside, the market stitched colors through the morning fog—glassblowers, fishmongers with nets threaded in faint phosphor, a woman selling spices that smelled like far-off summers. Lio moved through the crowd with his tool bag slung over one shoulder, boots ringing on planks, and the Lantern's hum underfoot like a reminder. The tower's light—bioluminal algae tamed into usable glow—beat in slow, reliable time. He'd learned to treat that beat as a patient. Today, that patient gave a note under the usual rhythm; a stutter, a breath too short. Lio felt it in his teeth before his eyes caught it.