POV: Kira Thorne

The rumble started as a whisper, a low thrum against Kira Thorne’s boots. It was a familiar language, one she’d learned from her father before she could read, a symphony of stressed metal and groaning rock. Most people on Aeridor lived their lives oblivious to the constant hum that vibrated through the very air they breathed, a testament to the immense engineering that held their world suspended. But Kira, Chief Maintenance Engineer of the Tethers, felt it in her teeth.

This morning, the whisper had turned into a growl.

“Status report, Link-7!” Kira’s voice, sharp and clear, cut through the ambient drone. She was perched precariously on a maintenance gondola, a small, open cage that clung to the outer shell of Tether Station Seven. Below her, a dizzying vertical mile of polished steel and reinforced dur-alloy plunged into the endless cloud sea. Above, the colossal underbelly of Aeridor, a patchwork of gleaming plates and glowing conduits, stretched into the perpetually overcast sky.

A thin, reedy voice crackled over her comm-link. “Fluctuations holding, Chief! Just a persistent tremor on the main line. No red flags.” That was Joric, fresh out of the Academy, his optimism as thin as the air at this altitude.

“No red flags, he says,” Kira muttered to herself, her gloved fingers tracing the cold metal of a junction box. She didn’t need the diagnostic readouts to tell her something was wrong. Her unique "sense," a kind of empathic vibration that she attributed to years of staring at stress fractures and listening to the hum of the tethers, was screaming. It felt like a toothache in the very foundations of their world.

She clicked off the comm and leaned out of the gondola, her safety harness taut. The wind, a constant, biting companion at Tether Station Seven, whipped at her practical, oil-stained jumpsuit and tugged at her dark, braided hair. Her eyes, the color of storm clouds, scanned the immense vertical span of Tether 7-A, one of the primary anchors securing Aeridor to its unseen counterweights deep within the clouds.

Tether 7-A was a marvel of pre-Ascension engineering, a braided beast of fused alloys, each strand thicker than a man’s torso. It had held for centuries, a monument to the ingenuity of the ancestors who had lifted them from the ravaged surface world. But even monuments could crumble.

Her gaze honed in on a section about twenty meters above her, where the dur-alloy sheathing shimmered faintly. It was barely perceptible, a ripple that mimicked the cloud currents, but it was there. She reached for her high-magnification oculars, clicking them into place over her eyes.

The world sharpened, the individual strands of the tether filling her vision. Her breath hitched.

Micro-fractures. A spiderweb of them, almost invisible to the naked eye, spreading across one of the primary load-bearing bundles. They weren't catastrophic, not yet. But they were deep, and they were fresh. And they were proliferating.

A chill that had nothing to do with the altitude snaked down Kira’s spine. This wasn't a normal wear-and-tear fatigue. This was accelerated decay. Almost… intentional.

"Joric, I'm going up to section Rho-9. Prepare for manual inspection,” she ordered, her voice now tight with urgency.

“Chief, the automated systems haven’t flagged anything there. It’s a stable zone,” Joric replied, a hint of protest in his voice.

“Just do it, Joric,” Kira snapped, already powering up the gondola. Her father had taught her that the machines were only as good as the engineers who built them. And sometimes, the machines lied. Or, more accurately, they didn’t tell the whole truth.

As the gondola ascended, slowly grinding its way along the tether, Kira’s mind raced. Tether failures were her greatest fear, a constant shadow in her life. Six years ago, she had watched a section of Tether Four snap, a terrible, booming crack that echoed across Aeridor, followed by a long, agonizing shriek as the sky-dock it supported plummeted into the abyss. Her father, Chief Engineer Marcus Thorne, had been on that sky-dock, overseeing a routine inspection. They never found his body.

The official report blamed an unforeseen material fatigue, a fluke. But Kira had seen the look in her father’s eyes that morning, a premonition, a flicker of worry she recognized in her own reflection. He had mentioned strange readings, anomalies that the automated systems dismissed. He had gone down there to confirm his suspicions, and never returned.

She reached Rho-9. The fractures here were more pronounced, deeper than she’d first spotted. They almost looked… etched. Not random, not natural.

She tapped her comm-link again, her voice low. “Joric, I need you to run a full spectral analysis on this section. Immediately. Cross-reference with every tether failure in the last decade, especially those attributed to ‘material fatigue’.”

There was a pause, then Joric’s slightly shaken voice. “Chief, that’s… highly irregular. The data on those incidents is classified, sealed by Royal Decree.”

Kira felt a surge of cold fury. “Then unseal it. Someone needs to know why this is happening. And if no one else will, it's going to be me.”

She ended the transmission, her gaze sweeping across the vast, cloud-filled expanse below. Through a momentary gap, a vast, swirling abyss, she caught a glimpse of something impossible: a jagged, dark silhouette far, far below. It wasn't cloud. It wasn't debris. It was solid. Land? No, that was forbidden knowledge, a fairy tale for children. The surface was dead, uninhabitable, a poisoned wasteland. That was what they were taught. That was what they believed.

But as the tremor intensified, vibrating through the very structure of Tether Station Seven, Kira Thorne knew one thing for certain: their world, suspended by these groaning giants, was far more fragile than anyone dared admit. And the immediate threat wasn't the dead world below, but the living, breathing danger hidden within Aeridor itself. The morning tremor was just the beginning.