Ezra Poole wanted her workshop to fly, but tonight it was sinking. Water bubbled up through the deck seams of her floating scrapyard, a patchwork of salvaged panels and scavenged beams she had bolted together herself. She bailed with a dented bucket, two strokes a second, and the water kept rising. Her whole plan lived on this raft. Every pump, every coil, every blueprint for the airborne forge she meant to build sat in the hold, soaking. She had sketched that forge for three years, ever since the Royal Academy threw her out and barred her from guild docks. An airborne forge needed no dock. No guild could padlock a building in the sky. But none of it mattered if the raft went down before sunrise. Ezra dropped the bucket and found the leak. A seam had split along the keel plate, below the waterline. Bailing was useless. She needed to seal it from inside, now. Her clockwork raven landed on the pipe above her, gears ticking under its black feathers. She had rebuilt the bird from a dead one years ago. It tilted its brass-ringed eye at the spreading water and clacked its beak. "I know," Ezra said. "Fetch the torch. The big one." The raven flew to the toolwall and gripped the welding torch in its claws. It could barely lift the thing. Ezra caught it as the bird dropped it, then dragged a scrap panel to the split seam. Water poured over her boots. Her apron, already burned stiff with old equations, soaked through at the hem. She held the panel against the leak and lit the torch. The flame hissed where it met the wet metal. She welded fast, one hand bracing the panel, the other steering the flame along the crack. Steam stung her eyes. The water had reached her knees. If the flame died, so did everything. The seam closed. The flow slowed, then stopped. Ezra killed the torch and listened. No new bubbling. The raft held. She sat back in the water and laughed once, out of breath. The raven dropped onto her shoulder. Then she felt it. The raft tilted. The patched seam held, but the weight of the water already inside had settled wrong. One corner of the workshop sagged low, and tools slid across the deck. The raft would not sink now. But it would not float level either. Across the water, a lantern lit up in the round window of a dwelling built from an old pressure tank. A figure stood watching her tilted workshop. Ezra did not know yet if that neighbor would help her or report her. She needed to drain the hold and relevel the raft before dawn. And she needed to do it before whoever held that lantern decided what she was.

By morning the raft sat level again. Ezra had pumped the hold dry and shifted ballast until the deck stopped sagging. The leak was sealed, the tilt was gone, and the lantern across the water had finally gone dark. Now she faced the harder problem. To lift this workshop into the air, she needed light materials. Everything around her was iron. She walked her scrapyard and weighed it in her head. Rusted plate. Salvaged beams. Engine blocks she had hauled aboard for parts. All of it heavy. A raft this loaded would never leave the water, no matter how much lift she built. She kicked an iron drum and it barely rolled. "You can't fly a graveyard," she said. The raven clacked on the toolwall. Its clockwork gears ticked under soot-streaked feathers. Ezra looked at the bird a long moment. She had rebuilt it from a dead one, stripped it down to almost nothing so it could still rise on real wings. Hollow frame. Thin brass. She knew how to make heavy things light. She just hadn't aimed it at the raft. She grabbed a crowbar and pried a hull panel loose. Solid iron, thick as her thumb. Useless whole. But she could cut it thin. She could hollow the beams, drill the plate, brace the weak spots with wire instead of bulk. Not new materials. The same iron, remade lighter. She lit the torch and started on the first panel. Something moved under the workbench. A sleek dark shape slid out, coat spotted gray with soot. A weasel. It must have come aboard in the night, hunting dry ground after the flood. It gripped a bolt in its teeth and darted toward a gap in the deck. "Drop that," Ezra said. The weasel froze. Then it slipped down into the hollow space below the deck, where she stored her offcuts. She followed the sound of scrabbling and found it crouched in a cavity she had never noticed. The flooding had washed out a layer of packed debris. Underneath sat a hidden pocket of hull, framed in old pipe. Tubes. Light, sealed, full of trapped air. Ezra pulled one free and hefted it. Barely any weight. Whoever built this raft before her had floated it on sealed pipe, then buried it under iron. She had been standing on her answer for three years. She hauled them up one by one. Twelve lengths of sealed pipe, each light enough to carry in one hand. Enough to frame a lifting deck. The weasel watched from the gap, bolt still in its teeth. Ezra let it keep the bolt. She laid the pipes across the deck and stepped back. The iron problem was solved. But the pipes were old, and sealed pipe cracks under heat. To build with them, she would have to forge beside them. One spark in the wrong place, and her buried air would blow.