Threadbare

I

Tethered

Elsha’s hands were rope-burned and raw by the time the fourth balloon snapped loose.

The first had been an accident. The tether line slipped while she was fixing the fray, and the damn thing drifted off like it had somewhere better to be. The second was sabotage. She’d watched that greasy merchant from Spindle Alley file halfway through the mooring line the night before. Probably insurance fraud. The third? Windstorm. Couldn’t be helped.

But this one? The fourth?

This one pissed her off.

She stood at the edge of the docking platform, watching the balloon float upward into the gauzy gray above. It bobbed gently, like it hadn’t just cost her a week’s wages. Like it wasn’t dragging two crates of grain and a quarter barrel of salt into the sky like an offering to some sky god with a cruel sense of humor.

“Shit,” she muttered. “Just keep goin', you smug bastard.”

The other workers scattered, not wanting to be caught near a scene. The Dockmaster would arrive soon, red-faced and yelling, and someone would pay for the loss. Maybe her. Maybe not. That was the thrill of Low Drift, punishment was more weather than justice. It came when it came.

She dropped the frayed end of the rope and wiped her hands on her threadbare tunic. The skin on her palms felt like it had been grated.

“You’re gonna get yourself hanged, girl,” said a voice behind her.

It was Dret, all bones and suspicion, leaning against a stack of netting with that knowing smirk he wore like a second skin. His face looked like it had been stitched together from leftover parts. He had lived through too many riots, too many crashes, too many mid-tier raids to believe in anything but survival.

“Not today,” Elsha said, not bothering to turn around.

“Dockmaster’s gonna skin you if he thinks that was your knot.”

“It wasn’t.”

He paused. “But he’ll think it was.”

“Yeah.”

Silence stretched between them, thick with soot and smog and everything unsaid in Low Drift. The city groaned above them, the whole floating sprawl held together with tired ropes and rusted faith. Low Drift was the bottom shelf of the sky, the last tether before the fall. They called it Drift because that’s all it did. Drift in the shadow of the levels above. Drift under the weight of everything it couldn’t be.

“Why do you stay?” Dret asked, and it wasn’t the first time.

Elsha finally turned to him. Her eyes weren’t soft, weren’t hard either. Just tired. Tired of watching her mother cough black every morning. Tired of climbing broken stairs just to braid ropes for tourists with silk gloves and shiny emblems. Tired of knowing she could build better, fly higher, live more, if someone up there would just let her.

“I’m not staying,” she said.

Dret chuckled. “You think that busted gondola and a hand-me-down map are gonna lift you to High Roost?”

“I know it will.”

“You don’t even know if that place is real.”

She looked up, past the drifting balloon, past the cloud belts, toward the glinting spires just barely visible when the wind peeled back the fog.

“It’s real. And I’m going.”

He didn’t argue. Just shook his head and limped off into the clanging mess of the dockyard.

Elsha walked back to the corner where her father’s prototype balloon lay hidden beneath tarp and rusted metal. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t sanctioned. But it was hers. Pressure-sealed, reinforced, stitched with contraband silk and rigged with every ounce of stubborn her old man left behind.

Inside the gondola was a journal. Her father’s journal. Pages of inked schematics, strange symbols, and a map scrawled in manic precision. At the top of that map, above Low Drift, above Midway, was High Roost.

And a single word, underlined in red.

Ascend.

She traced the word with her finger. Then she pulled the tarp tighter and walked off like she still belonged here.

Let them think she did.

For now.

Tomorrow, she’d fix the burner valve. Next week, she’d seal the last balloon chamber. And after that?

After that, she was going to rise.

And heaven help whatever she found up there. Because she wasn’t coming to worship.

She was coming to tear it open.

II

The Mapmakers Daughter

Elsha was seventeen. Sharp-jawed, sun-bronzed, and built like a climber. Every inch of her had been carved by labor and wind, arms lean from hauling tether ropes, fingers nicked from broken wire, legs sturdy from scaling the spires of Low Drift like a thief chasing clouds.

Her dark hair was a tangled braid that barely held together, same as her tunic, same as the gondola she slept beneath. Her eyes were the kind you didn’t want on you too long, storm-colored, unreadable, not because she was hiding something, but because she was always measuring, always calculating what it would take to survive you, outclimb you, or steal whatever you didn’t deserve.

The other kids her age had given up by twelve. By fifteen, most were already working the drop lines or sweeping hangars for fuel rations. A few made it to Midway. Fewer came back. Elsha didn’t have time to die dreaming.

She was too busy building.

The balloon frame took up most of the alley behind the steam chute. Every day after her shift, she dragged herself to the tarp-covered bones of her escape and picked up where her father left off. His journal, soft, leather-bound, and water-damaged, sat in a crate beside the burner housing. She didn’t need to open it anymore. The pages were memorized. Her father's shaky diagrams. His margin notes. His final message to her.

You will rise farther than I ever did.

He'd drawn the floating city in layers. Low Drift. Midway. High Roost. Above that, nothing but speculation. A dotted line. A question mark. A note in his scratchy hand: “The air thins. But truth sharpens.”

She didn’t know what that meant. Didn’t care, either. What mattered was that he believed there was more. And he’d built something to get there.

Elsha picked up the burner valve with hands still red from rope work. She’d scavenged a new seal that morning, traded two bread tokens and a half-bottle of cloudshine for it. Worth it. It meant the difference between lift and explosion. She twisted the brass into place and tightened it with a rusted wrench older than she was.

Footsteps behind her.

She didn’t flinch. Just reached under the tarp and grabbed the dented pry bar she kept there for company.

“I brought you this.”

It was Tay, the boy from the steam pumps. He looked like he was born apologizing. Hands too clean. Voice too soft. He held out a spool of wiring like it was a bouquet.

Elsha eyed it. “Where’d you get that?”

“Found it.”

“Uh huh.”

“Stole it,” he admitted.

“Better.”

She took the spool and turned back to her work. Tay hovered like a kid near a bonfire, unsure whether to warm himself or run.

“You ever think he made it?” Tay asked quietly.

“My father?”

He nodded.

Elsha wiped her hands and sat on the gondola’s edge. She stared up, past the steam pipes and sagging cables, toward the ever-churning fog belt. The part of the sky that swallowed balloons without a trace.

“I think he got close,” she said.

“And?”

“And I think they killed him for it.”

Tay swallowed hard. “You think they’re really like that? The ones up there?”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.

Everyone in Low Drift had heard the stories. How the High Roosters didn’t bleed. How they floated on silk and silence and sent down blind men to take the clever ones away. Maybe they were lies. Maybe not.

Didn’t matter.

If it was beautiful, she wanted to see it. If it was a lie, she wanted to tear it apart.

The sky above Low Drift wasn’t just sky. It was a lid. And Elsha? She’d spent her whole life learning how to pry things open.

She stood and rolled her shoulders, sore and strong.

“Get back before curfew,” she told Tay.

“You need help?”

“I need space.”

He nodded and slipped away.

Elsha watched him vanish down the alley, then turned back to the balloon. She reached into the crate, flipped to the back of the journal, and found the map again.

Three words were circled in red, etched deep enough to scar the page.

Lift. Pierce. Ascend.

She whispered them like a prayer.

Then got back to work.

Flashback

It was two years after her father disappeared. Elsha was fifteen and angry in every direction. Angry at the fog, angry at the creaking sky-ropes, angry at the way her bones jutted out sharper each week while the Dockmaster’s gut grew round on stolen rations.

But mostly, she was angry at her mother.

They sat across from each other in the tin-walled room that passed for a kitchen. One broken chair, one crate flipped upside down. A chipped cup of boiled grayroot between them. The bread on the table was more ash than grain, baked over steam exhaust, so dry it crumbled under a breath.

“You should eat,” her mother said, voice hoarse from another night of coughing.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You haven’t eaten all day.”

“I said I’m not hungry.”

Her mother didn’t press. She never did. That was part of the problem. Elsha wanted to be yelled at. Fought. Challenged. Anything but this slow, crumbling quiet that filled every room in Low Drift like mold.

“I found a gear ring today,” Elsha said instead.

Her mother didn’t look up. “Did you trade it?”

“No.”

“Elsha…”

“I’m keeping it. It fits the burner latch. I need it.”

That made her mother’s head lift, just a little. Her eyes were darker than Elsha remembered. Maybe always had been.

“You’re still working on that thing?”

Elsha didn’t answer. She pulled the journal from her satchel and placed it on the table between them. Her mother stared at it like it was a knife.

“He died chasing that dream,” she whispered.

“He didn’t die. He vanished. Big difference.”

“I know the difference.”

Elsha opened the book to the page with the drawing of the gondola and pointed to the adjustments she’d made, smaller burner, reinforced hull, dual chamber lift sacs. “It’s not just his anymore. I’ve made it better.”

Her mother’s fingers curled around the grayroot cup like she was trying to draw heat from memory.

“Elsha. There are things in the sky that don’t want to be found.”

“And I’m not looking for them.”

“Then what are you looking for?”

Elsha didn’t answer at first. She watched the ash bread crumble in her hands and felt the dryness in her throat, the staleness of the air, the constant pressure of being stuck in a place built to keep you stuck.

“I want to see it,” she said finally. “Even if it’s awful. Even if it kills me. I want to see what they’re hiding.”

Her mother nodded, slow and bitter.

“I used to want that too,” she said. “Then I got pregnant. Then your father vanished. Then I learned that wanting doesn't always end in seeing. Sometimes it just ends.”

Elsha stood. She didn’t want to hear more. She didn’t want to feel the softness creeping into her spine.

She tucked the journal back into her satchel and slung it over her shoulder.

“I’m not you,” she said.

Her mother didn’t flinch.

“No,” she said. “You’re him.”

And that hurt more than it should have.

As Elsha stepped out into the steam-lit night, the ash bread still sat on the table between them, untouched.

III

Silk and Blood

The market bled noise. Steam hissed from busted vents, wires sizzled where they met open flame, and people shouted over the grind of gears and the groan of tether lines as if volume could drown out how close everything always felt to collapse.

Elsha moved through it like a shadow. Eyes sharp. Shoulders down. Hands tucked inside the sleeves of her threadbare coat. She hated this part. Begging. Bartering. Stealing, when the odds tilted that way.

She needed silk.

Not the cheap, rat-gnawed kind they used for patchwork sails, but high-drift silk. The kind smugglers rolled into fake prayer flags or stitched into the hems of counterfeit clergy robes. The kind you only found in the deep stalls. The kind people killed over.

She headed toward the Needle Row, where sellers didn’t ask where you came from, just how much you could bleed. The air here was heavier, tainted with dye fumes and hot metal, and Elsha tasted iron just breathing it.

A wrinkled woman in a shawl of mismatched fabric blocked her path with a cracked grin. “Looking for thread, birdie?”

Elsha nodded once.

“Lift-grade?”

Another nod.

The woman’s smile widened, and her gums were black with rot. “Then you’ll want what I don’t have. And I’ll want what you can’t afford.”

Elsha reached into her coat and pulled out the coil of copper wire she’d pried from the elevator rig three nights ago. Still warm from her body heat, still braided tight.

The woman’s eyes lit up like she’d been offered fire.

“Go to stall thirty-three,” she rasped. “Ask for Bex. Don’t touch anything you don’t intend to buy. And don’t lie. He’s got ears.”

Elsha moved quickly, boots whispering over damp planks, stepping over buckets of dye, dodging swinging cages filled with threadmice and silk gnats. Stall thirty-three sat in the corner like it had been dropped there by mistake, no signage, just a gray curtain and the stink of oil and something sweeter underneath.

She stepped in.

And froze.

The man behind the counter was not what she expected. Tall. Clean. Eyes too blue. Hands too smooth for someone selling scrap in the smoke belt. He didn’t look like he belonged anywhere in Low Drift, let alone here.

“You’re not Bex,” she said.

He tilted his head. “Bex is dead. I’m leasing the name.”

She didn’t ask.

“I need lift silk. Grade three or better. Enough for a dual-sack.”

“Crested or plain?”

“Plain.”

He didn’t move, just stared at her like she was a formula he was solving.

“You building?”

She didn’t answer.

“Let me guess,” he continued. “Your father disappeared. Left you a map. You think you’re special.”

“I think I’m broke and in a hurry.”

He nodded slowly. “That’s better.”

He reached under the counter and pulled out a bolt of dull gold fabric, folded and sealed in oilskin. “Grade four. Fused weave. Enough for your build, maybe more.”

“What’s the cost?”

He tapped his chest. “Message delivery. Take a parcel to Midway.”

Elsha narrowed her eyes. “I don’t work for smugglers.”

“Everyone in Low Drift works for smugglers. Whether they know it or not.”

“What’s in the parcel?”

He leaned in. “Don’t ask that, Elsha.”

Hearing her name from his mouth made her skin crawl.

“I never told you who I was.”

“You didn’t have to.”

She hesitated. She thought about turning. About walking out. About going back to the gondola and sewing another patch from her mother’s curtains and hoping it would hold. But she was tired of hoping.

“Where in Midway?”

“Spire Thirty-Two. Look for the woman with white gloves and a red scarf.”

Elsha nodded once.

He passed the silk and a wrapped parcel across the counter. It was light. Too light for comfort.

“You go up,” he said as she turned to leave, “you better be ready to see down.”

She didn’t answer. Didn’t turn.

Just pulled the curtain aside and stepped back into the choking air of the market.

She had what she needed. Silk.

All it cost was trust.

And maybe a little blood.

IV

The Climb

The last night in Low Drift was all quiet and thunder.

Elsha waited until the Dockmaster’s final patrol staggered off, drunk on fogshine and false authority. She had loaded the balloon three hours earlier, tucked beneath the gutted frame of a retired lift pod, its rusted shell just convincing enough to pass for junk. Her heart was a drum she couldn’t silence. Not with breath. Not with logic. The air itself felt thinner already.

She moved fast, like hesitation was contagious.

The burner clicked on with a hard rattle, then hummed. The silk, her silk, billowed slow, majestic, like a beast waking up. The gondola groaned as weight shifted, and for a moment she was sure the whole thing would tip, flip, or burst into flame. But it held.

Of course it held. She’d built it.

She checked the satchel: copper tablets, water bladders, protein paste. Journal. Map. Parcel for Midway, now tucked inside a false panel in the gondola’s floor. She hadn't decided if she was delivering it yet. Just that she wasn't leaving it behind.

She stepped in.

This was it.

The platform beneath her creaked. Wind swirled in little vortexes around the loading area. She grabbed the release lever and stared up into the fog, into the vast unknown she’d only ever squinted at from below.

No crowd. No goodbyes. Just her. That felt right.

She pulled.

The locks clanked free. The balloon surged.

Her stomach dropped like it had been ripped out and tossed to the gutter. The first fifteen feet were pure lurch. Then came the wind. Then came the silence.

Low Drift shrank beneath her, the rooftops curving away like scales on a great dead beast. The fog belt above pulsed and twisted like it was alive, like it knew she was coming.

She hit it twenty minutes in.

The balloon tilted sideways, violently. The burner coughed. Moisture built up around the seams, freezing, cracking. Elsha scrambled to stabilize the ballast, shifting weight, sealing flaps, praying she hadn’t overlooked something stupid like airflow math or pressure bleed.

The fog swallowed her.

All sound died. Even her breath felt muffled. She could see nothing. Just white and wet and dread. She kept her hands on the ropes, fingers numb, forcing herself to breathe in counts of four. Just like her father taught her when storms hit.

In. One. Two. Three. Four.
Out. One. Two. Three. Four.

It helped. A little.

Then she saw it.

A shape. Black. Hanging just below the fog ceiling. Motionless. It looked like a balloon, but old. Deflated. Its gondola hung limp, shredded. A rope dangled from its frame, ends frayed. There was something scrawled along the side, letters barely visible.

Return is not ascent.

She blinked. Looked again.

Gone.

She didn’t know if it had ever been there.

Then the wind shifted, and the balloon broke free of the fog like a swimmer gasping from a dive.

Light. Real light.

And a horizon.

The Midway tier stretched out above her, layered and curved, built like a bowl turned upside down. Platforms jutted out like tongues. Ropes snaked between towers. Balloon ports blinked with red lights. It was larger than she imagined. Closer to a city than a checkpoint.

Her arms ached from holding the rig steady. The burner flickered. She dropped the pressure valve and descended into Midway’s dock channel, slow and shallow.

A voice crackled through a speaker, harsh and flat.

“Identify.”

She grabbed the forged crest from her pocket, cheap tin, fake etching, and held it up to the lantern mount on the gondola’s side.

Pause.

“Permission granted. Dock at Ring Three. And stay inside the lines. You veer, you drop.”

Typical Midway welcome.

She angled toward the landing ring, eyes scanning the tiers for Spire Thirty-Two. The red scarf. The woman with the white gloves.

The delivery she didn’t want to make.

Wind gusted, pushing her off line. She fought it. Corrected. Landed hard, but upright.

As the gondola thudded onto the deck, hands in gray uniforms rushed out to secure it.

Elsha stood, boots hitting metal for the first time since lift-off. Her legs wobbled. Her gut spun.

But she was here.

She’d climbed.

Now came the part nobody talked about.

What happened when you landed.

V

Welcome to High Roost

The first thing Elsha noticed was the silence.

Not the peaceful kind. Not the hush of wind or the calm before a storm. This was a held breath. A listening silence. The kind that made your neck itch and your fingers twitch toward sharp things.

Midway smelled like oil and perfume. Clean, but wrong. Too sterile. Like someone had tried to scrub the history off the walls. But the bones were still there. You just had to look hard enough.

She kept her satchel close and her eyes moving. Her balloon was now tethered and stripped, tagged by the portmaster and rolled into the registry like any other climbing dreamer. No one questioned her crest. No one asked about the build. Which worried her more than if they had.

Spire Thirty-Two sat across a latticework bridge from her dock, stretching up into the cloud-split like a needle stabbed through gauze. She moved fast, boots muffled on the composite floor panels, passing by shuttered shops and watchful eyes behind mirrored windows.

This was Midway.

Where people went when they had just enough to leave Low Drift, but not enough to rise further. A purgatory with pretty lighting and a ninety-five percent compliance rate.

Midway was founded during the third expansion of the Sky Caste System. When Low Drift grew too bloated with ambition and waste, they built upward, platforms and pylons stitched into the upper thermals, reinforced with stolen tech and tethered to promises. It was sold as progress.

Really, it was containment.

Low Drift had too many questions. Too many people poking holes in the idea that your place in the sky was fated at birth. So they offered a new promise: work hard, keep your head down, and maybe, maybe, you could earn your way into Midway.

Once there, they told you the same thing all over again. Play nice, obey, maybe you’ll earn High Roost. Only difference was the collars were silk now.

High Roost wasn’t built. It was inherited. Those towers hadn’t been touched in a hundred years. No new spires. No repairs. Just rituals. Just rot. They didn’t expand High Roost, they preserved it. Like a shrine. Or a tomb.

Elsha didn’t want to visit it.

She wanted to crack it open.

But first, the job.

She found the spire’s main lift blocked by two attendants in matching gray wraps, eyes obscured behind mirrored faceplates. Uniforms starched to the point of hostility. She showed the parcel. No questions. One of them pressed a palm to the door scanner and the lift opened with a hiss.

She stepped inside. The walls closed like a coffin.

The lift climbed slow. Everything in Midway moved slow. On purpose. It wasn’t about efficiency. It was about control. Make people wait. Make them obey. Make them remember who held the strings.

The lift stopped on Level Twelve.

The doors opened to a room that looked like it belonged in another city entirely.

Carpets. Actual wood trim. Candles that didn’t flicker with static. There were couches, gold-threaded, too clean to sit on. And in the center of it all, a woman.

She wore a red scarf and white gloves. Just like he said.

“Elsha,” the woman said, without turning around.

Elsha tensed.

“How do you know my name?”

The woman turned. Her face was ageless. Perfect. Like someone had painted her and then cursed the painting. Skin too smooth. Eyes like glass. Smile like a scalpel.

“You brought something for me.”

Elsha pulled the parcel from her satchel but didn’t offer it yet.

“What’s in it?”

The woman’s smile didn’t shift.

“You wouldn’t understand it.”

“Try me.”

“It’s a list,” the woman said. “Of people who forgot their place. Of people who still believe in climbing. We don’t like lists like this to stay on the ground.”

“So why am I carrying it up?”

“Because that’s how this works, dear. You want the sky? You pay for it in silence. In obedience. Or in complicity.”

Elsha felt something hollow out behind her ribs.

“I didn’t agree to that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

The woman reached out. Elsha handed over the parcel.

“I should go,” Elsha said.

The woman nodded.

“You should. Before Midway starts welcoming you properly.”

As Elsha turned to leave, the woman called out, soft and sharp.

“You look just like your father.”

That stopped her cold.

“I didn’t tell you who he was.”

“You didn’t have to.”

Elsha walked faster.

Back to the lift. Back to the edge of Midway. Back to her balloon. She checked the lines. Checked the silk. Checked the burner. She wasn’t staying another night in this dead place.

Midway was worse than Low Drift. At least in Low Drift, people knew they were stuck.

In Midway, they believed they were free.

And High Roost?

High Roost was the dream.

Which meant it was probably the worst of all.

VI

Glass Bones

The climb from Midway to High Roost was not a straight line.

It wasn’t even a climb, really.

It was an invitation.

Elsha didn’t plan on rising that day. She planned to re-stabilize her balloon’s fuel matrix, eat half a protein bar, maybe sleep for twelve hours and forget that red-scarf woman’s voice. But before she even finished recalibrating the pressure dial, three figures in white drifted toward her platform on balloons so silent they felt summoned.

They didn’t speak.

They handed her a scroll, sealed with wax and marked with a crest that pulsed faintly, like it had a heartbeat.

Inside, four words.

We see your potential.

And below that, coordinates.

She should have thrown it into the sky and let the clouds eat it.

Instead, she packed up her gear, burned a slow lift, and followed the coordinates. Curiosity is the leash no one talks about.

The ascent was different this time. No wind. No turbulence. Just a steady pull, like something was drawing her balloon upward, ignoring gravity and reason. Her skin tingled. Her ears popped. And the higher she went, the quieter everything became. Even her thoughts started to sound like echoes.

Then, at last, High Roost.

It didn’t look like a city.

It looked like a fossil. A monument to something that had died long ago and was too proud to admit it.

Towers spiraled up into glassy domes. Walkways stretched across impossible distances with no supports. Everything gleamed, but not with warmth. It gleamed like bone in sunlight.

Elsha docked at a pad made of translucent stone and stepped onto it like she was stepping onto the back of a dead god.

No guards. No handlers.

Just silence, and the distant hum of machinery too perfect to be real.

She followed the only path available. It led her into a structure shaped like a ribcage. Inside: mirrors. Everywhere. No doors. No furniture. Just her reflection, fractured a hundred times over.

A voice crackled from the walls. Genderless. Precise.

“Name.”

“Elsha.”

“Full name.”

“Elsha Drift.”

Pause.

“Drift is not recognized.”

“No shit,” she muttered.

A door appeared.

Just... appeared.

She stepped through.

The next room was a dome. At its center stood a circle of figures dressed in white, each wearing masks made of translucent material that shimmered when they moved. Behind them, tubes pulsed with violet light. Inside the tubes: shapes. Human-sized. Suspended. Breathing.

She didn’t ask what they were.

One of the masked figures gestured.

“Elsha of the lower tether. You have breached three strata. You have arrived unbidden, yet expected. This denotes ambition. Audacity. Potential.”

“You already said that,” she replied.

The mask didn’t move. But something behind the glass smiled.

“You will undergo orientation. Cleansing. Integration.”

“Into what?”

The room dimmed. One of the tubes hissed open.

Inside it, a woman stepped forward, naked and flawless, her skin glistening, her eyes vacant. But Elsha knew that face.

It was Tay’s mother. The one who vanished two years ago.

Elsha backed up. “What did you do to her?”

“She has been elevated. She is free of burden. Free of weight. She is part of us now.”

The woman’s movements were mechanical. Too smooth. Her fingers flexed like she was remembering how hands worked.

“You turned her into a puppet.”

“She surrendered her name. Her memory. Her pain. And in doing so, she was reborn.”

Elsha shook her head. “You’re not gods. You’re parasites.”

“That’s a word used by the grounded.”

One of the masked figures approached Elsha with a glass vial. Inside, a glowing silver liquid.

“Eliminate what tethers you,” it said. “We will lift you further.”

Elsha took the vial. Held it in her hand.

She turned it slowly.

Then she smashed it against the floor.

The liquid hissed, burning a hole into the pristine tile.

“I’m not here to be remade,” she said. “I’m here to remember what you buried.”

The figures didn’t move.

But the room darkened.

The woman, Tay’s mother, tilted her head, as if recognizing her for the first time. Then a single tear slipped down her cheek.

Elsha ran.

Back through the mirror room. Back through the bone gate. Alarms didn’t sound. Doors didn’t slam shut. That was the worst part.

They let her go.

Like she was already theirs.

VII

The Feast

Elsha didn’t sleep.

She tried. Back in her gondola, tethered awkwardly to a platform they assigned her, sealed tight against the thin wind. But her body wouldn’t shut down. Not after what she’d seen. Not after what she’d been offered.

And definitely not after what they called cleansing.

She’d seen Tay’s mother, stripped of memory and language, walking like a puppet and crying like a child. She’d seen masked figures offer her a glowing vial of amnesia disguised as elevation. She smashed it. Walked out.

And they let her.

Which meant one of two things.

Either they didn’t see her as a threat.

Or she was already a part of the system, and just hadn’t realized it yet.

She stared at the ceiling of the gondola until the light shifted outside, taking on a warmer tone. Not sun. Not in this place. More like artificial dawn. Like the city knew it should simulate time to keep people sane.

A message blinked on her port panel.

You are invited. Attendance is mandatory.
The Ascendant Feast. Sector Aureline, Hall of Hollow Flame.
Dress accordingly.

She laughed out loud. It came out hoarse and cracked.

No RSVP. No "hope to see you." Just be there.

She didn’t want to go.

So, of course, she did.

**

She arrived in the same brown clothes she wore the day she climbed. No silk robes. No pressed whites. No mask.

She stood out like rust in a jewelry case.

The Hall of Hollow Flame was a cathedral of glass and bone, literal bone. Ribbed columns curved over the massive dining space, and chandeliers made from spine segments flickered with blue flame. Music played, but it was tuneless. Just a soft, looping pattern that didn’t quite resolve.

The guests were beautiful.

Too beautiful.

Not one wrinkle. Not one blemish. Like they’d been cut from marble, then polished until their souls disappeared.

They smiled. But no one really talked.

Elsha took her place at the end of the table. Her name was carved into the chair. Not painted. Carved. Like they'd expected her.

A masked attendant poured a drink she didn’t recognize into a crystal glass she couldn’t afford to imagine.

Another laid a napkin across her lap. She didn’t touch either.

She watched.

And then the food came.

It was gorgeous. Plates of pale fruit and iridescent cuts of meat. Glazed petals. Gelled orbs. Things that shimmered and twitched and steamed like they were just short of alive.

No one prayed. No one clinked glasses. They just began eating.

Elsha kept her hands in her lap.

Across the table, she saw a girl. Younger than her. Maybe twelve. She wore silk. Her eyes were too large for her face. She smiled at Elsha, then picked up a fork and started eating what looked like raw fish. Except it wasn’t fish. It was twitching. Still trying to breathe.

“Is this what progress looks like?” Elsha muttered.

A man beside her turned. He had silver eyes. They weren’t contacts. They glowed.

“Progress isn’t the right word,” he said. “We don’t move forward. We refine.”

“What am I eating?”

“Nothing yet,” he said, grinning. “But if you were, it’d be volunteer protein.”

Elsha’s throat closed.

“Excuse me?”

“The Ascension Process creates... residual material,” he said, still smiling. “We waste nothing.”

She stood.

Every eye turned to her.

The music kept playing.

“This is a goddamn abattoir,” she said.

“No,” said a voice at the head of the table. “This is tradition.”

It was the red-scarf woman. She hadn’t aged. She hadn’t blinked. She looked like an image that never updated.

“You’re consuming people,” Elsha said. “The ones who ascend. You’re eating them.”

“We’re honoring them,” she said.

Elsha wanted to scream.

Instead, she reached into her coat and pulled out a small detonator. Just a spark trigger. Nothing massive. Just enough to unhook the tether holding her gondola in place. The balloon would rise. Drift. Panic the system.

She clicked it.

Somewhere in the distance, an alarm started.

Chaos bloomed. Not much. Just enough.

She backed toward the doors. No one stopped her. They just watched. Like they were letting her go.

Again.

But this time, she was sure.

They weren’t letting her escape.

They were tracking her.

Watching what she'd do next.

And now she knew what she was eating. What they were all eating. What this city was built on.

Not faith. Not progress. Not air.

Flesh.

VIII

The Spine

Elsha ran.

The sounds of the feast still echoed behind her. That wet smacking. The scrape of knives on glass. The laughter that didn’t come from lungs. Her boots struck the glimmering pathways of High Roost like she was pounding the ribcage of a corpse, hoping it would cough up its secrets.

She didn’t stop until the lights around her shifted from gold to blue. Until the scent of perfume and sterilized vanity gave way to something older. Ozone. Rot. Metal.

She was near The Spine.

She hadn’t planned this. Not really. There wasn’t a map for what she was doing. No detailed schematic in her father’s journal. Just one cryptic page, written in trembling script:

Everything above survives on what’s below. Cut the tether.

Below that, a crude drawing. A vertical shaft at the heart of the city, with twisting lines like arteries feeding from it. He had called it The Spine. He’d circled it, once. Then slashed through it in red.

Elsha found herself standing before a gate carved to resemble vertebrae. The two halves curled inward, meeting at a jagged seam that pulsed with soft light. No guards. No camera drones. No masked observers sipping distilled blood cocktails.

That was the first warning.

Whatever was beyond that gate didn’t need protecting.

It was the thing that protected everything else.

She stepped closer. The gate hissed. Opened.

The corridor beyond was colder. Lit from beneath by veins of pulsing blue. The floor flexed slightly under her weight, like it wasn’t metal. Like it was skin stretched over bone. She didn’t look down too long.

The further she walked, the more the city changed. Towers were no longer ornamental. These weren’t the sky-piercing spires where the elite posed for portraits and whispered compliance into the air.

These were industrial.

Utility spires.

Support columns.

The scaffolding of a monster trying to look like a god.

She reached a lift. No buttons. No lights. Just a platform and a circular hatch. Her fingers hesitated on the rim, then gripped and twisted.

The hatch opened with a groan.

She dropped in.

**

The descent was silent.

No wind. No vibration. Just the platform lowering into a tunnel that throbbed with power. The walls weren’t lined with tech. They pulsed. Veins. Actual veins. Embedded in metal.

The shaft narrowed, then widened. At the bottom, a chamber. Circular. Ringed with catwalks and sloped scaffolding. At the center was The Spine.

Not a metaphor. Not an idea.

A literal column. Pale. Organic. Like a tree stripped of bark. Thick cables and tubing pierced it in dozens of places, drawing something out and feeding it upward. Fluid hissed through glassy arteries, up and away toward the levels above.

Elsha stared, breath caught somewhere in her ribs.

The Spine was alive.

A faint heartbeat echoed through the room. Not mechanical. Biological.

She moved forward, boots sticky now. The floor wasn’t floor. It was more skin. Grey and translucent. Beneath it, shapes twitched. Small. Human-shaped. Unformed.

She stepped lighter.

Reached the railing. Looked over.

The base of The Spine widened into a kind of nest. Tubes fed into it from below. And nestled in that base were bodies.

Some whole.

Some in pieces.

Every one of them alive.

Stripped. Wired. Eyes open.

She staggered back, bile climbing up her throat.

The people fueling the city weren’t dead.

They were kept.

Milk-fed. Sedated. Stretched out like veins themselves.

She heard a cough. Sharp. Behind her.

She spun.

Tay stood there.

Except it wasn’t Tay.

Not really.

He looked like him. Same mop of dark hair. Same crooked nose. But his eyes were white. Not blank. White. No pupils. No iris. Just snow.

“Elsha,” he said.

Not his voice.

Too smooth. Too practiced.

“I wondered how long it would take you.”

She stepped back.

“What is this?”

Tay stepped forward. His skin didn’t move right. It flexed over his bones like it had been molded instead of grown.

“This is the truth.”

His hand gestured to The Spine.

“You’re seeing the engine. What keeps High Roost afloat. What makes the silk stretch. What powers the drift systems. What allows the minds above to stay clean while the bodies below rot.”

“These people...”

“Volunteers,” he said. “At first. Then selected. Then... grown.”

“Grown?”

He pointed to the floor.

Beneath the skinlike surface, something twitched violently.

Elsha fell to her knees.

“You’re farming people.”

He tilted his head.

“Call it what you want. But it works. No fuel like living tissue. No processing losses. No resistance. They’re kept in stasis. The brain is quiet. The body lives. We harvest gently. Sustainably.”

She looked up at him. Her eyes weren’t scared anymore.

They were murder.

“You kept my father here.”

Tay smiled. “He lasted longer than most. Clever man. Resistant to sedation. He damaged one of the feed pumps. Caused a blackout in Midway. For that, he was repurposed.”

Elsha stood slowly.

“Where is he?”

Tay gestured to the Spine.

“Everywhere.”

**

She moved before she knew she had moved.

The pry tool came from her belt, swung low, fast. The blade buried in Tay’s throat. Except it didn’t bleed. It hissed.

He gurgled, mouth opening too wide, revealing metal underneath.

He wasn’t Tay.

He was a shell.

A mouthpiece.

A puppet.

He fell.

The chamber dimmed.

Above, alarms started, low tones, not emergency but alert.

She ran.

Found the control station near the base of the Spine. Tubes. Levers. Symbols she didn’t recognize.

She flipped them anyway.

Flipped everything.

One valve screamed as it turned.

A hiss echoed through the room. One of the bodies at the base convulsed, then another. Tubes snapped. Fluids sprayed, pink, milky, hot.

The heartbeat in the walls stuttered.

She grabbed a chunk of piping and slammed it into a glass conduit. It shattered. The pressure dropped. The fluid inside turned to steam. The walls blinked.

The city blinked.

Elsha ran again.

Not out.

Up.

She climbed the scaffolding, up and over the writhing nest, higher into a corridor lined with breathing vents and pulsing cables. Sparks burst as systems failed. Below her, something deep groaned. A pain groan. A death groan.

The Spine was failing.

She hit a bulkhead. Slammed the release. Nothing.

A voice came from the wall.

“You’ve killed them.”

“No,” she shouted. “You did. I’m just ending it.”

“They were chosen.”

“They were harvested.”

“You will doom us all.”

Elsha reached into her coat. Pulled the last remaining fuel cell from her gondola’s emergency burner. A volatile, high-yield spark cell. Enough to ignite a lift pod.

Enough to blow a hole in a wall.

She jammed it into the base of the bulkhead. Yanked the timer pin.

Ten seconds.

She ran.

The explosion ruptured the corridor, flames bursting outward, cables flailing like severed limbs. The blast knocked her sideways. She fell hard, hit her shoulder, rolled.

Then came the sirens.

Real ones this time.

High Roost wasn’t invincible.

She had proven that.

She limped toward the lift chute. Her legs barely worked. One eye swelled shut. Blood ran from her nose.

The city groaned again.

And this time, it didn’t recover.

She had severed The Spine.

The sky would feel it.

The rich would feel it.

And whatever survived the fall would remember who made it possible.

**

She made it back to her gondola just as the first blackout rolled through the upper tiers. The platforms flickered. The spires wavered. Something massive shifted overhead.

She untied her rig manually. No power. No automation.

The balloon lifted.

Slow. Ragged. Glorious.

Behind her, High Roost cracked.

One of the outer towers buckled.

Lights died.

The city screamed.

Not people. The city itself.

It had never been real.

It had always been meat, dressed in silk.

And now it was bleeding out.

Elsha didn’t smile.

Didn’t cheer.

She just drifted.

Into the dark.

Carrying with her the truth.

And the last breath of her father’s rebellion.

IX

Unmoored

Elsha didn’t know how long she drifted.

Time lost meaning somewhere between the moment she cut the tether and the moment the first piece of High Roost fell from the sky. She had heard it. A low, groaning crack like a god pulling a knife out of its own spine. Then came silence.

Not peace.

Not calm.

The silence of something sacred breaking.

She lay in the bottom of her gondola, blood dried in the crease of her lip, her arm swollen and purple from the blast recoil. Her left leg barely moved. She didn’t check to see if it was broken. Didn’t matter. She wasn’t walking anywhere.

Above her, the sky was empty. The towers of High Roost, once so arrogant, had gone dark. Spires that used to glow with ivory light now bled smoke. The tether lines that held the tiers in place, the veins of the city, had gone limp. Some had snapped entirely. One still trailed behind her balloon, dragging a shredded flag of silk like entrails.

The city was unmoored.

And so was she.

Her fingers found the journal. Her father’s. Now hers. The pages curled at the edges, brittle from years of grease, wind, and stubborn use. She flipped to the back, where his last map lived. A vertical sprawl. Low Drift. Midway. High Roost.

No longer stacked.

Now just ruins in freefall.

She let the book close and rested her forehead against it.

“You were right,” she whispered. “But you didn’t tell me how much it would cost.”

**

The transmission came four hours later.

Just a chirp, really. Then a static burst. Then a voice.

“...sha. Elsha, if you’re alive, answer.”

She stared at the console like it had just coughed.

“Repeat. Elsha Drift, this is Corran Lowe. We have survivors in Midway. System collapse. No contact from High Roost. Repeat, High Roost is presumed offline. We... we saw what you did.”

Elsha leaned forward, every bone in her back groaning.

She flipped the transmitter switch.

“Corran,” she said. Her voice cracked. “You made it.”

A pause. Then a rough laugh.

“Damn right I did. And so did about thirty others. You’ve got no idea how bad it was down here. We didn’t even know the Spine was real. Just... stories.”

Elsha coughed. Spit blood. “It was real. And it was alive.”

“Figured as much,” Corran said. “We’re trying to stabilize the grid. Basic power. No lift control. Most of Midway’s tethers are down. We can’t get anyone out. Can you come down?”

She looked at her balloon’s controls.

“I can try,” she said. “But the burner’s done. And I’ve got maybe twenty minutes of pressure left. I’m not sure how gentle this descent’s gonna be.”

“Doesn’t need to be gentle. Just needs to be.”

She smiled. First time in days.

“Copy that.”

**

The descent was agony.

Without lift assist, the balloon dropped hard, then corrected, then dropped again. She used every trick she knew, shifted ballast with her hands, vented pressure in bursts, angled the gondola with what little rudder control remained.

Below her, Midway was lit by emergency flares. No more glowing balconies or decorative banners. Just smoke, fire, and movement. Real people. Running. Working. Rebuilding.

She landed in a crash of metal and sparks.

Pain flared through her leg. A scream ripped out of her throat before she could swallow it. She blacked out halfway through the second one.

When she woke, Corran was sitting beside her with a stolen medkit.

“You look like hell,” he said.

“I feel worse.”

He offered her water. She drank.

“You dropped High Roost,” he said. “No one’s admitting it, but we know it was you.”

She tried to sit up. Winced.

“I didn’t drop it. I just cut the leash. It was already falling.”

He nodded. “We’ve got pockets of power. Some basic systems coming back online. But the top’s gone. Like, gone gone.”

“Good,” she said.

“Maybe. But now the problem’s ours.”

She looked at him.

He wasn’t angry. Just tired. Like a man who had watched every system he trusted break in real time.

“There’s something else,” he said. “Your mother’s alive.”

Elsha’s mouth opened. Closed.

“She made it out of Low Drift. The collapse pulled power from the entire stack. Lift restraints failed. She took an old cargo pod and followed the power trail. Landed two days ago. She’s asking for you.”

Elsha turned her face away.

She didn’t speak.

Corran didn’t push.

**

When she finally stood, on crutches, with half her ribs bound tight, Midway looked different.

The people were dirty. Tired. But alive. And real.

No masks. No white gloves. No empty smiles.

Just humanity. In all its mess.

She found her mother near the docks. She was thinner. Older. But her eyes hadn’t changed.

“I told you not to chase ghosts,” her mother said.

“And I told you I wasn’t staying,” Elsha replied.

They stood in silence a while.

Then her mother said, “Your father would have been proud.”

Elsha didn’t cry.

She wanted to.

But she was hollow. There’d be time for grief later. If they survived what came next.

Because Midway was unmoored too.

And when a city floats with no tether, it either drifts into something new…

Or it falls.

**

That night, a council met in one of the old utility towers.

Elsha, Corran, three survivors from High Roost who had defected before the fall, and two Dockmasters from Low Drift.

The room stank of old cables and fresher wounds.

“We can’t stay like this,” said Corran. “The tether system’s compromised. If we don’t reconnect, ”

“We don’t reconnect,” said Elsha. “We rebuild. Different. Better.”

The Dockmaster snorted. “You think the people want different? They want food. Power. Light. Not philosophy.”

Elsha stood, wincing.

“They want truth,” she said. “They want to know what they’ve been feeding. What they’ve been climbing for.”

Silence.

Then one of the defectors from High Roost, a woman named Rienne, spoke.

“I know where the memory cores are,” she said. “The archives. They kept records. Footage. DNA logs. It's in the Spine backups.”

Corran leaned forward. “You can access it?”

“With help.”

Elsha nodded slowly.

“Then that’s where we go next.”

Corran raised an eyebrow. “Back into the monster?”

“No,” she said. “Under it.”

**

And just like that, the plan formed.

The final chapter.

They’d descend into the wreckage. Find the truth. Uncover the records. And show the world what High Roost really was.

Not just a city.

A system.

A machine made of bodies and lies.

And Elsha?

She’d be the one to burn it clean.

X

Cinders and Spindles

Elsha didn’t sleep much anymore. Not because of nightmares, though they came often, full of blue-lit ribcages and eyes that didn’t blink, but because her brain wouldn’t shut up. Every time she closed her eyes, it felt like a generator flipped on behind her forehead. Ideas. Memories. Faces. The Spine. Her father’s last breath stretched across a vat of pulsing meat.

And underneath it all, the constant hum of unfinished work.

She sat near the fractured control tower they’d turned into a makeshift command post, watching smoke thread through the sky like someone was still up there painting over what remained of High Roost. The top tier had mostly collapsed. Anything left had either burned or sunk into the cloud belt. Occasionally, a spire chunk would fall through, screaming like a meteor. They didn’t even flinch anymore when it happened.

Elsha’s ribs itched under the bandages. Her leg still dragged a bit. But she was healing.

Everyone was.

Well, except the ones who weren’t.

A lot didn’t make it. Some were already hooked to the city’s bones when the rupture came. Others didn’t know how to live without the hierarchy, the ceremony. You build your life on chains, and when someone cuts them, you don’t always get up and walk away. Sometimes you just lay there. Confused. Bleeding out in the freedom you swore you wanted.

Corran called it the lull. The part after the revolution, where you start wondering if you should’ve just kept your head down.

Elsha hated the lull.

That’s why she was working.

“We’ve mapped 48% of the broken tether lines,” Rienne said, sliding a screen across the cracked desk toward her. “Thirty-two are beyond repair. Twelve might be salvageable.”

“Don’t salvage them,” Elsha said.

Rienne blinked. “What?”

“No more tethers. That’s the old way. We connect on our terms, or we don’t connect at all.”

Corran sighed from the corner. “You want to float loose? That’s chaos.”

“That’s honesty.”

He rubbed his temples. “You want to build a city on truth? People want plumbing, not poetry.”

“Maybe,” she said, “but I’m not rebuilding the same goddamn mausoleum we just tore down. I’ll sleep in the dirt before I let silk and hierarchy creep back into the cracks.”

Corran looked at Rienne. Rienne looked at the map.

“No more tethers,” she repeated, almost to herself. “Okay.”

**

Three days later, they descended into the Spine’s husk.

It wasn’t a rescue. It was a reckoning.

The lower vaults had survived the explosion. Barely. The organic core, the warm belly of the city where the bodies had been grown and drained, was a smear now. A collapsed cavity of rot. But below it, under the harvest chambers, behind a vault door coded to a gene-sequence only High Roost carried, were the memory cores.

Rienne cracked the lock with blood drawn from her own arm.

“It’ll think I’m one of them,” she muttered.

Elsha nodded. “You’re not. Not anymore.”

The door groaned open like it hadn’t been touched in a hundred years.

Inside: rows of silvered cubes, stacked like tombs. Each one glowed faintly. Each pulsed in rhythm. Like they were still breathing.

Corran pulled the first one free and jacked it into the portable relay they’d salvaged from a Midway logistics tower.

The images started slow.

A boy. Fifteen. Stripped, screaming. His name was Janto. They’d promised him ascension. He’d questioned the Spine’s ethics in a public forum.

Another. A woman. Eighty-two. Smiling. Volunteering. Her breath trembled as they inserted the feed tubes. By the end, her eyes didn’t blink. But her body kept pulsing. Twenty years of clean fuel.

Another. And another. Names. Faces. Stories.

Some begging.

Some chanting.

Some whispering like they understood the price and were grateful to pay it.

Elsha felt like she was watching a virus learn to smile.

“How do we show them?” Corran asked, voice low.

“All of it,” Elsha said. “No edits. No voiceover. Just the raw footage. Put it on the broadcast bands, drop it into every hub. Even if it kills what’s left of the old system.”

“It will kill it,” Rienne said. “People need comfort.”

“Then they can build it themselves,” Elsha snapped.

**

They called it “The Memory Drop.”

It hit every level simultaneously. A flicker on the feed loops. Then the first scream. Then the sound of a child’s prayer. Then thirty-eight hours of unfiltered horror, on repeat.

The city cracked.

Some refused to watch. Called it lies. Deepfakes. Propaganda. They held little salons in the half-lit corridors of collapsed spires, sipping old fogshine and pretending everything would go back to normal.

Others watched every second. Didn’t eat. Didn’t sleep. Just wept.

Most hovered somewhere between—angry, confused, boiling with guilt they didn’t ask for and shame they didn’t understand.

And underneath it all, something started to shift.

A realignment.

No leaders. No vote.

Just understanding.

The top was never sacred.

The city never floated on faith.

It floated on bones.

**

Elsha drifted.

Not away. Not above. Just through.

She flew the balloon again, or what was left of it. Her father’s rig was scorched and half-melted, but the frame held. The silk, patched with scavenged fabric, didn’t rise pretty—but it rose.

She moved between sectors, ferrying supplies and word. She didn’t carry orders. She carried options.

Build low, she told them. Build flat. Share lift. Don’t mimic the tower. Mimic the tetherless.

Some listened. Some didn’t.

Didn’t matter.

It was in motion.

And no one could stop it.

**

One night, drifting over the old waste channels between Midway and Low Drift, she heard a knock from below.

She almost didn’t believe it. No one knocked from below.

She lowered a line.

Tay climbed up.

Only... it wasn’t Tay.

Not the shell that had parroted the city’s voice. Not the white-eyed puppet.

This one was rough. Real. Scarred.

“How?” she asked.

“I think... I think I was never completely taken,” he said. “Something held. Something fought. When the Spine went down, whatever was controlling me burned out. I woke up in the wreckage.”

She didn’t hug him.

She didn’t cry.

She just made space on the floor and tossed him a canteen.

“You remember?”

“Most of it,” he said. “Not all. Some parts... I wish I didn’t.”

She nodded.

They drifted in silence.

When morning cracked through the fog like a split tooth, Tay looked at her and said, “What now?”

And Elsha, seventeen years old, daughter of a mapmaker, breaker of bones and cities, just stared out at the horizon and said:

“Now we live.”

Then, quieter:

“For real this time.”

**

Threadbare never became a name.

Not like that.

It became a warning.

A whisper.

A prayer.

In the new settlements, stitched along the ragged rim of what was left, people hung scraps of silk in the windows. Not whole banners. Not polished crests.

Frayed bits. Torn edges.

To remember.

Not the fall.

Not the glory.

But the lie.

And the girl who unraveled it.