Old Things

Sunset turned the library gold.

The shelves ran floor to ceiling on three walls, packed with more books than any one person could read in a lifetime, and the last light of the day caught their spines and made them glow amber and rust and deep brown.

The smell of old paper and binding glue had lived in this room so long it had become part of the air itself—the kind of smell that was supposed to mean something, that was supposed to make a person feel the weight and privilege of knowledge. She had never quite managed it.

The teacher’s voice filled the room in the unhurried way it always did—steady, patient, and entirely ignorable. He had been going for the better part of an hour now, moving between the reading table and the great window at the far end, gesturing at maps and open pages as though the information might somehow arrange itself more compellingly if he moved his hands enough.

But this girl, alone here with only the teacher and her guard inside the vast library, was paying him no mind. She sat sideways in the window seat, one leg tucked under her, and stared out at the city below.

From this height she could see the lower rings spread out beneath the palace quarter—the crooked rooftops, the market squares still busy with the last of the day’s trade, and above it all the steady drift of aerocrafts moving between the rings like slow sparks carried upward by invisible heat. She watched one bank lazily to the left and disappear behind a tower, and felt something in her chest pull in the same direction. Down there, the city moved without her. Down there, people went where they chose.

The teacher cleared his throat.

She straightened so fast the book nearly slid from her lap. She caught it and held it open at the same page she had been pretending to read for the last twenty minutes.

“It seems your mind is elsewhere, yet again, Princess.” The teacher walked toward her and she held the book a little higher, as though that might help. “Tell me, Princess Vivian—why are we studying the history between Cornelia and the Akuran Empire?”

She held out for exactly one second before she broke. “Why do I have to study this? I already know the basics. Isn’t that enough for their ambassador’s visit?”

“They will be coming from their homeland, your majesty, and will be staying here for quite a while,” the teacher said, in the same tone he used for everything—the tone that made even wars sound like weather. “We may as well make sure we do not say anything insulting unintentionally.”

“The Akurans have been after us for years,” she said, “and now they suddenly want to play nice? My father is clearly deluded.” She crossed her arms. The book closed on its own.

A quiet sound came from near the door. Her guard, shifting his weight. She glanced at him and found him looking at the ceiling with the particular expression he wore when he was choosing not to have an opinion.

“Perhaps the princess has been studying long enough,” he said, addressing the teacher with quiet finality. “She has been at this since morning. Let us conclude for today.”

The teacher was not pleased. He took a slow breath and gathered his papers. “Very well. But the ball is happening within the week. The princess still needs to prepare.” He looked at her over the rims of his spectacles. “There is more to diplomatic etiquette than knowing when to stop talking, your majesty.”

She smiled at him until he looked away.

“I’ll make sure she’s ready,” the guard said, and held the door open. The teacher left.

The door closed.

The composure she had held together all morning dissolved the moment the latch caught. She crossed the room in three steps and threw herself face-first onto the nearest couch.

“I hate this!” she announced, her voice somewhat muffled by the cushion.

“Princess, someone might come in.”

“I don’t care!” She rolled over and stared at the ceiling. “Every time there is a dignitary coming, I have to brush up. I know this already. I have known all of it for three years.” She flung one arm over her eyes. “And no one ever asks me anything. They just make me study it again. As though knowing it once was not enough. As though I might have forgotten which empire has been trying to swallow us whole.”

She sat up abruptly. “Barnabus. Can we go to the city?”

Barnabus sighed. A short, resigned sound she had known her entire life—the same sound he made when she was nine and had climbed onto the roof of the east wing, and again at eleven when she had tried to bribe the kitchen staff into letting her take one of the supply aerocrafts out alone.

It was a sigh that had learned, over many years, that arguing first was a waste of breath. “No, Princess Vivian. Especially not this week. The whole city is preparing for the Akuran arrival. It would not be appropriate.”

“You are absolutely no fun.” She turned and dropped sideways against the armrest, staring at the ceiling. “You used to be fun, you know. Before.”

Something shifted in the room. Not much—just a fraction, the way air moves when a window closes somewhere far away. Barnabus said nothing for a moment.

“We are grown up now,” he said. “We have responsibilities.”

“ You have responsibilities. I have lessons.” She sat up and pointed at him. “Ever since you joined the Greycoats you have become completely dull. You follow me everywhere, you say no to everything, and you look at the ceiling whenever I say something you don’t want to answer.” She dropped her hand. “You know I hate dull.”

He looked at her steadily. He did not look at the ceiling.

She stood, gathered her skirts so they wouldn’t catch her feet, and walked toward the door.

“Where are you going?” Barnabus asked, moving immediately.

“Somewhere that isn’t dull.”

“It’s nearly supper. You should be preparing—”

“They can wait.” She pushed the door open. “I’m going to the city.”

“Princess Vivian—”

* * *

The day stretched long and loud around Cole as he worked on a midsize cruising craft with several of his coworkers, guiding them through each step while his mind stayed somewhere else entirely. He kept thinking about the lights.

The way they had danced below the city’s edge, just beyond where anyone was supposed to go. The old shipyard sat sealed off by the earthquake’s damage—everyone said so—and yet something down there had been moving.

“Hey, Cole!”

He snapped back. “What? Yeah?”

“I’m asking if I’m aligning this properly.” His bald-headed colleague pointed at the coupling he was holding in place.

He looked and felt his stomach drop slightly. “No. No, you’re not. Here—” He stepped over and corrected the angle before anything could be damaged.

“Cole.” Mr. Gran’s voice came from behind them, measured and unhurried in the way that meant he had been watching for a while. “You’ve been off your game since morning. Are you sick?”

“I’m fine, Mr. Gran. Just a lot on my mind.”

“Well, I can’t have a lot on your mind costing me a repair job.” Mr. Gran folded his arms. “Take a break. Teaching your coworkers is good, but teaching them wrong first doesn’t help anyone.”

He set his tools down without arguing.

He settled on a crate near the wall and wiped the sweat from his forehead while the others kept working. One of his coworkers dropped down beside him a moment later.

“You alright? Really?”

He turned the question over. “Is the old shipyard operational again?”

His coworker blinked. “What? No. The access wall came down in the earthquake last month. Nobody’s getting in or out of there.” He paused. “Remember? We lost a void canister because of it.”

He remembered. He wished, briefly, that he didn’t.

“Hey!” His coworker twisted around and called across the floor. “Remember last month when Pillow Hands over here dropped the void canister during the earthquake?” The laughter came fast and loud from every corner of the workshop. “Cost us an entire month’s wages, you dummy!”

“Yeah, yeah.” He stared at the floor. “Enough.”

“Anyway—why are you asking about the old shipyard?”

He sat with the question for a moment. He thought about saying it—about the lights, about how they had been moving, about how something down there was alive when nothing should have been. Then he thought about how it would sound. “Nothing,” he said. He got up and walked away before anyone could push further.

That was when he saw them.

Two cloaked men stood near Mr. Gran’s office, speaking to him in low voices. Mr. Gran looked confused, which was unusual enough on its own—the old man was rarely confused about anything. After a short exchange, all three of them disappeared inside and the door closed behind them. One of the men had carried a large metal case at his side.

He slowed without meaning to. The case was wrong in a way he couldn’t immediately name. It wasn’t the size of it, though it was large. It wasn’t the material, though the latches had an unfamiliar finish.

It was the shape—the proportions were off in a way that didn’t match anything made in the lower or middle rings, and it definitely wasn’t an upper-ring fashion piece either. Whatever it was built for, it wasn’t decoration.

“Cole, can you check this out?!”

One of the cloaked men turned and looked directly at him through the office window. He moved to the nearest aerocraft and picked up a wrench.

He did not look back up. But he felt it—the weight of being watched—for a long time after.

“Cole!” Mr. Gran called from the office doorway. “Come here for a sec!”

His forehead creased. “Why? I’m almost done here!”

“Just come over. Let them finish it!”

The others glanced at him. He set the wrench down against the wall, wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, and crossed the floor toward the office. He knocked once out of habit and pushed the door open.

“Close it behind you,” Mr. Gran said.

He did. The two burly men were still inside, standing on either side of the desk with the metal case between them. Up close they were larger than he had registered from across the workshop floor—broad across the shoulders, the kind of build that came from years of heavy work rather than idleness. The tattooed one watched him cross the room with an expression that gave nothing away.

“My friends here need some help with something,” Mr. Gran said, and nodded toward the case.

One of the men unlatched it and folded the lid back.

He approached the desk slowly and looked down. Inside, nestled in fitted padding, sat a single component—metal, cylindrical, roughly the length of his forearm. Worn at the edges. He studied it for a moment without touching it.

“That’s a pump piece,” he said. “Part of a larger assembly. A voidryte levitation engine , if I had to guess.”

The two men exchanged a look.

“How can you tell it’s a piece?” the tattooed one asked. “As you said.”

He reached in and lifted it carefully, turning it in his hands. “The ring alignment here, and here.” He pointed to two bands of fitted grooves near the base. “And there’s an inner tube running through the center—you can see it if you look straight down the bore.” He held it up and peered through it the way a person might look through a short telescope.

“This isn’t a standalone unit. It connects to something larger.” He tilted it toward the light and his expression shifted slightly. “Corroded, too. This hasn’t been maintained in a long time.”

He set it back in the case and stepped away from the desk. The men were watching him with something he couldn’t quite name—not suspicion exactly, but attention. Careful attention. The kind people paid when an answer mattered more than they were letting on.

It felt, oddly, like a test.

“Can you fix it?” the larger man asked.

“Not like this,” he scratched the back of his neck. “I’d need to see the whole engine. One piece doesn’t tell me enough—I’d fix this and something else would go, and we’d be back here again.” He glanced between them and Mr. Gran, who was doing a poor job of hiding how pleased he was with whatever he was hearing.

“And I’ll tell you something else—they don’t build engines like this anymore. Everything now is compact, interchangeable, built to be swapped out fast. This is older work. Precise in a different way. Deliberate.” He tapped the edge of the case. “Whoever made this took their time.”

“So,” the larger man said, “can you fix it?”

The room went quiet. Mr. Gran looked at him. The two men looked at him.

“No,” he said.

The disappointment was immediate and visible.

“But,” he added, “if I can see the whole engine—all of it—I can probably rebuild it properly. Not patch it. Rebuild it. Then you won’t be coming back with pieces in a case.” He paused.

“I make no promises,” he added. “It depends entirely on the engine and how far gone the rest of the ship is.”

“That’s a big ask coming from a kid,” the larger man said.

“That kid may solve your problem, though.” Mr. Gran set his coffee cup down with quiet finality.

Both men looked between the two of them. Then the larger one closed the case and latched it, and the tattooed man extended his hand—first to Mr. Gran, and then, to his genuine surprise, to him. He shook it. The man’s grip was firm and brief and said nothing, which somehow said quite a lot.

Then they were gone.

He stood in the middle of the office and did his best to look like his heart wasn’t hammering. Mr. Gran produced a glass of water from somewhere and set it on the desk, and he drank it in one go.

“What was that about?” he asked.

“Just some of my very old friend’s men,” Mr. Gran said, settling back into his chair. “He needs help with something.”

“Your friend should scrap that ship and buy a new one.”

Mr. Gran laughed—a real one, short and warm. “He’d sooner scrap himself. He loves that ship.”

He thought about that and found he genuinely didn’t understand it. Old things broke down. Old things needed constant attention, constant coaxing, constant compromise. Everything worn out could be replaced with something better, something newer, something that wouldn’t leave you stranded with a piece of corroded pump in a metal case. Sentiment, as far as he could tell, was just another word for stubbornness.

“Cole.” Mr. Gran’s voice dropped slightly. “Keep this between us, yeah?”

He looked at him. Something about the whole afternoon sat in him at a strange angle—not wrong, exactly, just unusual. The kind of unusual that made the back of his neck feel awake. “Of course,” he said. “Anything for you, Mr. Gran.” He paused at the door. “Can I borrow the bike again tonight?”

Mr. Gran was already waving him out. “Finish the repair job first. Then it’s yours.”

He stepped back onto the workshop floor with his arms stretched wide and said nothing to anyone for the rest of the afternoon.

* * *

That night, he took the aerobike out past the edge of the city and cut the engine to a low idle.

He hovered at the boundary for a moment, scanning the dark below. No patrol lights moved between the ring’s underside and the cloud layer. The air was still and cold at this height, and the city behind him hummed with its usual distant life. He waited. Then he pushed the throttle forward and descended toward the old shipyard.

The lights were still there.

They moved the way they had the night before—not erratic, not accidental. Deliberate. Careful. The kind of movement that came from people who knew what they were doing and didn’t want to be seen doing it.

He was fifty feet out when the patrol ship found him.

Its searchlight swept across him without warning and locked on. He stopped the bike dead in the air and raised both hands, the throttle still warm under his palm. Below him, the lights in the shipyard went dark all at once, as though they had never been there at all. He stared at the space where they had been and took a slow breath.

It seemed, he thought, that he was about to go somewhere too.

* * *

The cell was small and smelled of rust and cold stone, and he sat on the bench with his elbows on his knees and stared at the floor. He had been there long enough that the guards had stopped looking at him with any particular interest, which he supposed was progress of a kind.

Then a familiar silhouette filled the corridor outside the bars. Wide. Solid. Deeply unhappy.

He stood up.

Mr. Gran’s expression was the worst he had seen since the aerocar incident—a specific combination of disappointment, exhaustion, and the kind of restrained fury that was somehow worse than shouting. He signed the papers the guard produced without saying a word. He did not look at him while he signed them.

They were three blocks from the station before he spoke.

“What,” Mr. Gran said, in a voice that had stopped needing to be loud a long time ago, “were you doing out at the outskirts.” It was not quite a question.

The smack to the back of his head arrived a half-second later, open-palmed and inevitable.

He said nothing. He had considered, on the bench in the cell, whether to tell Mr. Gran about the lights—about what he had seen both nights, about the way they moved, about the fact that something was happening in a place that was supposed to be sealed off and empty. He had decided against it.

He didn’t think Mr. Gran would disbelieve him exactly. He just didn’t know what Mr. Gran would do with the information, and that felt like reason enough to keep it.

He was still working through that thought when he caught movement at the edge of his vision.

Two shadows, just at the limit of where the broken moon’s light reached through the cloud cover. There and then not there, fast enough that he couldn’t be certain.

He stopped walking.

“What is it?” Mr. Gran asked, turning.

He looked at the empty street behind them. “I thought someone was following us.” He waited another moment. “Must be my imagination.”

Mr. Gran stared at the same patch of dark, then turned back around. “We are not done,” he announced, and resumed walking. “When we get back, we are going to have a long conversation about how you’re going to pay for my aerobike.”

He followed him home and said nothing. But he did not look at the street behind them again, because he was fairly certain that if he did, he would find it wasn’t empty.