Strange Lights

The warmth of sunlight woke him as the buzzing street noise came to his ears. He rose from his makeshift bed and yawned, blinking at the familiar cracks running along the ceiling above him.

The room was small—barely enough for a cot, a shelf of dog-eared manuals, and a workbench cluttered with scavenged parts he kept meaning to sort through. Gaps in the wooden walls let in thin blades of morning light and the distant clatter of the lower ring waking up. Cart wheels on uneven stone, vendors calling their first customers, the low hum of aerocraft engines warming up somewhere overhead.

He stretched his arms and stood, scratching the back of his head as he shuffled toward the broken mirror propped against the wall. A crack ran diagonally across its surface, splitting his reflection into two slightly misaligned halves.

He grabbed his goggles from the shelf and pulled on his trousers, then looked at himself once more. He raised both hands and slapped his cheeks lightly—once on each side—and the sting of it chased the last of the sleep from his eyes. His ember-colored eyes stared back at him, that odd shade people always remarked on, like cooling iron catching its last light. He smiled at nothing in particular.

“Cole! You better be awake now and help me out here! I swear, boy, I’m going to kick you out into the streets if you keep sleeping till noon!”

An old man’s voice cut clean through the floorboards. He grabbed his bag and was already moving before the echo died.

“Coming, Mr. Gran!”

He took the stairs two at a time. At the bottom, the world shifted entirely. The noise of the street vanished and in its place came the heat and smell of the workshop — the hiss of steam venting through a pressure coil, the deep mechanical groan of something large being turned over by hand.

Mr. Gran stood in the middle of it all, glorious gray beard bristling, arms already in motion before Cole had both feet on the ground floor.

“I swear, Cole, if I had anyone else in this whole lower ring who knew their way around engines, I would have already kicked you out! Now get a move on and fix this aerocar’s engine before I lose what little patience the gods saw fit to give me!”

The vehicle in question sat with its rear hull open, innards exposed—a mid-sized aerocar, city model, the kind that ferried merchants between the lower and middle rings. Something about the engine bay already looked wrong to him before he even got close.

“Will do, Mr. Gran!” He moved toward it and slid his bag off his shoulder. “And for what it’s worth, you won’t find anyone better than me down here. They all left for the middle and upper rings.”

“Boy, you are testing my patience!” A wrench sailed through the air. He ducked it without breaking stride, and it clattered off the wall behind him. “Fix the engine. When we get paid, I’ll buy you better tools—and then maybe I can get rid of you before supper for once. Everyone wins!”

“Will do, Mr. Gran!”

He dropped down and slid under the engine housing, letting his eyes adjust. The undercarriage was older than it looked from the outside—patched in at least three places with parts that didn’t quite match.

He traced the conduit lines with one finger, checking alignment by feel before he looked, the way his hands had learned to do it before his brain caught up.

“You know, Cole,” his coworker said from somewhere under the adjacent vehicle, not looking up, “if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were really stretching your luck staying down here.”

“Mechanics always leave after three years,” he answered, still tracing. “Try their luck in the upper rings. None of them ever came back either, so I figure I’m not missing much.”

“Yeah, but why are you still here?”

He didn’t answer right away. His hand had found the heart of the engine—the void cannister—or container, depends on you were talking to. Small and dark and faintly warm even at rest, sitting in its housing like a coal that hadn’t quite gone cold. He turned it slightly and watched the way the light caught it.

“I’m looking for something new,” he said.

He smiled.

* * *

By the time the city lit up for the evening, the aerocar was done.

The lower ring street lamps flickered on one by one, and the warm light spilled through the open workshop doors and caught the freshly cleaned hull of the vehicle sitting in the bay.

Mr. Gran stood near the front of it, counting his money with the focused joy of a man doing his favorite thing, lips moving slightly with each note he turned over.

The aerocar’s owner stood opposite him, arms crossed but smiling—a broad, prosperous-looking man with an expensive coat that had seen better days and a laugh that filled whatever room he was in.

“I swear, Gran. Despite your prices, getting my aerocraft repaired at your shop is still the best decision I make all year. Heck, I’d argue you run the best shop in the whole city. Just how do you do it?”

“It’s just the Gran way of doing things.” Gran tucked the money away and straightened up with the satisfaction of a man who had never once undersold himself. “I told you we’d fix it faster. And we made it better while we were at it.” He turned and pointed. “Come here, boy. Come here!”

He looked up from wiping his hands on a rag. He had been trying to stay usefully busy near the back of the workshop, out of the way. He walked over slowly.

“Here he is. The boy wonder!”

The heat that climbed his neck had nothing to do with the workshop temperature. He was not built for being pointed at.

“This is your boy wonder?” The man looked him over with the undisguised assessment of someone accustomed to appraising things. “How old are you? You look barely old enough to be fiddling with engines.” He leaned toward Gran. “How much are you paying him? I have a friend who would pay him double. No—triple.”

“Hey, hey, hey!” Gran stepped forward, arms out. “Quit scouting my miracle worker! This boy has a hard head and he shows off more than I’d like, but he is my prized employee and you are not stealing him!”

The man laughed and the rest of the workshop laughed with him, and even Gran cracked after a moment, his whole beard shaking with it.

“I’m joking, I’m joking,” the man said, waving a hand. He turned back to Cole with genuine curiosity now. “But seriously, boy—what happened to my car? I want to know what I actually paid for.”

Cole tucked the rag into his back pocket. “Someone misaligned the voidryte carrier in the engine. The energy transmitters and the container holders weren’t tuned to each other, so they were working against it instead of with it.” He paused. “If you hadn’t brought it in when you did, you’d have been looking at a cracked voidryte container inside a month.”

The man’s smile faded. Around the workshop, a coworker let out a low whistle. Someone else set down their tools.

“What?” the man said. “My vehicle is new .”

“A cracked voidryte,” Cole repeated, keeping his voice even. “They’re expensive to replace. The whole engine’s no good without one.”

“My vehicle is new,” the man said slowly. “It couldn’t just develop that on its own.”

“No,” Cole agreed. “It couldn’t.” He glanced around at the mismatched parts he’d pulled out and set aside during the repair. “Did you take it somewhere else before you brought it here? For a tune-up, maybe, or a part replacement?”

The man went very still.

Gran cleared his throat and stepped in smoothly. “What Cole means to say—and what I want to make clear—is that we can’t speak to how it happened or who’s responsible. All we know is what we found.”

He looked at the man with the calm steadiness of someone who had navigated a few of these conversations before. “You may want to have a talk with wherever you took it last. Get your money back if you can. But I’d ask you not to mention that you heard about it from us.”

“I know how these things work,” the man said. His jaw was tight now, but he nodded once. “They shouldn’t have touched it to begin with.” He pulled his coat straight and walked to the aerocar, boarding it with the deliberate movements of a man choosing not to say everything he was thinking. He looked back from the seat.

“Thank you, Gran. Cole.” He started the engine—it turned over clean and quiet, the way a properly aligned voidryte sounded—and rose smoothly out of the bay. “You’ll be seeing more of me. And I keep my promises.”

He waved once and then he was gone, his running lights shrinking into the stream of evening traffic above the lower ring.

Gran watched him go, then turned around and stood with his hands in his pockets.

“Cole,” he said. “You’ve been working on that aerocar five days straight. Take tomorrow off. Come back the day after.”

Cole looked up. He considered this for approximately one second. “Can I borrow one of the aerobikes?”

Gran waved him off before he finished the sentence. “Just don’t go past the air limits.”

He was already moving.

The aerobike sat at the back of the lot—a narrow two-wheeled flier with a small void engine and handlebars that vibrated slightly at full throttle, one of Gran’s older models, more patched than original at this point, but it ran clean and it ran fast.

He kicked it to life, felt the familiar hum settle up through the frame and into his palms, and pulled out of the workshop lot and up into the lower ring sky.

“Thank you!” he shouted back, though he was already too high for Gran to hear it properly.

He opened the throttle.

The lower ring spread out beneath him—rooftops and lamp-lit streets and the web of sky-lanes connecting the rings above and below, all of it familiar, all of it his in the way that a place becomes yours when you’ve looked at it from enough angles. He banked right at the edge of the residential quarter and climbed until the city noise fell away and there was nothing around him but open air.

To his right, the cloud sea opened up.

He had seen it a hundred times. It never got old. The clouds stretched out flat and white under the moonlight, vast and quiet and impossibly clean-looking from up here, with the full moon hanging above it all and the stars so thick they blurred at the edges.

Below, somewhere under all that white, was the cloud belt—and below that, things that didn’t have names people used in polite company. But from up here it just looked like the world had been given a floor made of light.

He held his breath for a moment and then let it go slowly.

Then he turned back toward the city.

He found a spot on one of the outskirt terraces—flat stone platforms that jutted from the outer edge of the lower ring, built for loading cargo but empty at this hour. He set the aerobike down and sat on the edge with his legs hanging over nothing.

The night air was cool and carried the faint smell of machine oil and something sweeter from the market stalls below. He leaned back on his hands and looked up.

Something in the corner of his eye caught him.

He turned.

Below the terrace, below the lower ring entirely, where the underside of the city dropped away toward the clouds—lights. Moving lights. Not the fixed glow of the street lamps or the running lights of docked vessels, but the slow, deliberate lights of something large navigating carefully in the dark. Something very large.

He leaned forward and squinted. The lights were descending—no, not descending. Docking. Settling into position below the city, in the space where the old shipyard used to operate before it closed.

He looked up automatically at the new docks, high on the upper ring, where the masts and running lights of a dozen registered vessels bobbed in their moorings. All accounted for up there. All orderly. All where they were supposed to be.

He looked back down.

The old shipyard had been closed for five years. He knew because Gran had complained about the loss of business when the district sealed off the access routes. You didn’t dock a ship—a large ship, judging by the spread of those lights—in a closed shipyard by accident. Not when there was a perfectly good new facility sitting at the top of the ring.

“Oi! Is that your aerobike?”

He spun around so fast that he nearly lost his seat on the edge.

A city patrol officer stood at the far end of the terrace, one hand on his hip, looking at the aerobike with the expression of a man who had been waiting for exactly this kind of evening.

“Ah—yes, sir. That’s mine.”

“And is this,” the officer said, gesturing at the terrace with elaborate patience, “a designated parking area?”

He scratched the back of his neck. “It’s the middle of the night, sir. I only stopped for a moment to—”

“I can impound that bike for illegal sky parking.”

He was on his feet and moving to the aerobike before the officer finished the sentence. “I’m going, sir. Right now. Going.”

He launched off the terrace and climbed fast, the officer’s parting words trailing up after him.

“Remember the rules of the sky, boy!”

He exhaled all the way back to the workshop. Gran would have had his head if he’d lost that bike. He brought the aerobike down into the lot, locked it up carefully, and went upstairs.

His room was quiet. He lay on his cot and stared at the ceiling and listened to the city wind down around him. Through the gaps in the wall he could see the distant glow of the palace, sitting high on the upper ring—its towers lit even at this hour, remote and unhurried and entirely unconcerned with what happened in the lower ring.

He thought about the lights below the city. The closed shipyard. The size of whatever had slipped in under the cover of dark.

Something about it sat wrong in the way that a misaligned void container sat wrong—not broken, not obvious, just slightly off from how it ought to be. His hands always found those before his brain did.

He was still thinking about it when he fell asleep.