The smell hit him first: brine thick with rot, smoke from cooking fires, the wet leather scent of tarpaulin stretched too long under sun. Joshua leaned over the edge of the stone balustrade and watched the floating city shudder beneath the morning light. Thousands of rust-colored rooftops moved like breath in the swell. Not a real city, not the kind you draw borders around or name in books but a city of survivors, nailed together, lashed to itself to keep from sinking.
He used to live down there. Fifth plank from the east wall. Shack with a torn sail for shade, half a door and no roof when the wind turned cruel. Ma sold salted eels from a crate that stank of vinegar and rotwood. He could still feel the splinters under his soles, still hear the creak and slap of water licking the stilts. Still hear her voice calling him back when he lingered too long near the wall.
Now, he was on the other side of it. The stone city reared behind him—clean, carved, walled so high the clouds seemed like part of its architecture. Scattered sunlight hit marble. Bells rang soft from the towers. Up here, the wind didn’t stink. It smelled like pressed linen, like paper, like space.
He hated it.
They called it civilization. Said the wall kept out disease, crime, flooding. They never said it kept out people. But Joshua knew. Every white stone he passed carried that lie like a polished scar.
He hadn’t spoken since crossing the gate.
He swallowed. His throat burned from the silence, from the gravity of looking down and knowing what he’d left. He told himself it was to get her medicine. To find a better life. To climb. But standing here, it felt like betrayal. Like he’d stepped on the raft and watched her vanish into the fog.
The sea city heaved, restless. Somewhere below, a pot clattered, a baby wailed, a man shouted over wood and water. Real life. The kind that didn’t echo.
Joshua turned away from the edge and stepped into the sunwashed street. The stone was warm beneath his feet. Too smooth.
He missed the splinters.
The gates closed behind him with a hush too polished to be honest. Not the groaning kind he’d known all his life, but the quiet click of mechanisms built by men who never feared rust or flood. Joshua walked, shoulders hunched slightly though no one was staring—yet. The streets were broad and gleaming, swept clean by boys in gray tunics who never looked up. No shouting. No
bartering. Just the soft roll of wheels on stone and the whisper of sandals moving like thought across the city’s veins.
He passed rows of homes. Whitewashed, blind-faced things with tall windows and thin trees planted in even lines. No laundry hanging. No chipped paint. No people sitting on stoops yelling about fish or rain or debt. Just silence, as if noise itself was outlawed. As if memory was.
A woman crossed his path, pale blue silk brushing the ground, her hair coiled like the brass handles of temple doors. She didn’t see him. Or saw him and chose not to. He touched the hilt of the knife tucked into his belt, not out of fear, but to remind himself it was still there. That he still was.
He moved past a fountain, a marble beast pouring clean water into a basin where children drank from silver spouts. He watched them. Clean, well-fed, eyes soft and round like they’d never seen blood in the streets or dragged a net through sewage for half a crab. One of them looked at him. A boy, maybe eight. Not afraid. Just curious. Then a nursemaid tugged him away and the moment folded closed.
He walked on.
Further in, the white city became something worse than grand—it became careful. Everything manicured. Flowers trained to bloom in rows. Statues too smooth, too finished, their eyes vacant. A man sweeping steps tipped his hat but said nothing. Joshua didn’t nod. Didn’t smile. He hated this place for how it didn’t ask him who he was. For how it presumed.
By the time he reached the plaza, he was sweating. Not from the sun—it was cool in the shade of the high halls but from something internal. Some resistance. Some guilt. The kind that settled deep in the bones. He stopped under a colonnade and exhaled.
There was a boy playing a lute across the square, music drifting like perfume. A girl watching from a window above, her chin resting on her hands. A man reading on the steps of a courthouse, lips moving soundlessly with each word.
Joshua took it in like a man denied water too long. And still—still—he missed the stink, the noise, the chaos of floating wood and cheap rope. He missed the ugly beauty of survival. Here, in this place of marble and music, he felt less alive. More ghost than guest.
And yet, he moved on.
He didn’t know if it meant climbing.
Or falling.
He turned a corner, eyes half-lowered, and nearly walked straight into a man carrying a crate of fruit so red they looked like rubies caught mid-bloom. The man jerked back, startled. Apples spilled across the stone. A pause. Then recognition—slow, like light creeping into a locked room.
“Joshua?”
The voice struck first. Low. A little hoarse. Familiar.
He looked up.
Jalen.
It had been years. Five? Seven? The last time they’d spoken was on the western flats, where the fish guts ran thick in the drains and boys carved each other over bread. Jalen had been lean and fast, a runner of messages and debts. A good liar. Now he looked full. Flesh on his cheeks. Clean clothes. Boots that fit. The crate he carried bore the seal of a merchant house.
“Well, well, Joshua,” Jalen said, a touch too casually, as he knelt to gather the scattered apples. He avoided Joshua’s eyes. “Didn’t think I’d see you up here. Thought the tides finally claimed you with the rest of us.” There was a subtle edge to his voice, something that hinted at old resentment, or perhaps a twinge of guilt.
Joshua stood stiffly, hands clenched. He didn’t offer to help. His lock on to the apples that were perfect, almost artificial in their sheen. The kind of fruit that would have sparked a riot in the floating city. Here, they were just carelessly spilled. “I heard rumors,” Joshua said, his voice flat. “That you’d… adapted.”
Jalen’s smile was quick, almost practiced. “Adapted? That’s one word for it. We all find our ways to survive, don’t we? Now, these won’t pick themselves up. Lend a hand.” He gestured to the apples, a flicker of something – was it pity? – in his eyes.
Joshua finally crouched, the smooth stone feeling alien beneath his knees. He picked up an apple, its weight a strange contrast to the emptiness in his stomach. He turned it slowly, noting the flawless skin. Down below, people were bartering for scraps, and here… “They just discard them,” he said, the words barely a whisper.
“The ones with the slightest bruise,” Jalen confirmed, watching him carefully. “The ones that don’t fit the ideal.” He stood, brushing off imaginary dust. He held out an apple. “You learn to accept it. It’s easier.” There was a plea in his voice now, a desperate hope that Joshua would understand, would join him.
Joshua’s jaw tightened. “I don’t want to learn.”
Jalen’s laugh was short, humorless. “Nobody wants to. But wanting doesn’t change how things are, does it? It just makes it harder. Stop asking so many questions, Josh. It’s safer that way.”
Joshua didn’t take the apple. He looked past his old friend, past the street with its blind windows and careful trees, toward the towers and spires beyond. A city built so high it had forgotten the ground it rose from.
“How long have you been here?”
“Long enough,” Jalen said. “Long enough to forget what salt tastes like when it stings your eyes.”
Joshua gripped the apple and set it gently back into the crate.
“This place has everything,” he said, mostly to himself. “But it lets them starve.”
Jalen didn’t reply. Just hefted the crate into his arms and looked at him, something unreadable flickering behind his eyes.
“You coming?” he asked.
Joshua watched him go a few steps, then followed. Not because he trusted him. But because he had to see how far the rot reached.
The streets narrowed the closer they drew to the hill. Not in width, but in breath. The stone here was quieter, more restrained. Fewer carriages. More guards. Archways rose above like jaws, polished bronze and white banners hanging stiff in the still air. Jalen said nothing. He moved like someone used to being ignored in high places. Joshua followed, eyes never resting, cataloging what didn’t belong: no children, no dogs, no laughter.
They stopped before a hall flanked by marble lions, teeth bared in stone. A clerk in soft blue robes blinked once at Jalen, then opened the door without a word.
Inside: cool air, the smell of parchment and old oil. Joshua’s boots echoed too loud across the inlaid floor. The chamber beyond was shaped like a bowl—benches rising in rows, filled with men and women in silver-threaded robes, their faces lean and gaunt as hawks in flight. At the center sat a raised dais, and on it, three figures in white. No ornament. No crowns. Just white, as
if the absence of color proved their virtue.
“Merchant Tribunal,” Jalen murmured. “They govern trade routes, ration grain, set tariffs. Decide which quarter eats, which drowns.”
A clerk stood at the center podium, reading out a list of complaints: crop failure in the eastern marshes, piracy in the gulf, surplus in northern granaries. Each item delivered in the same tone, neither urgent nor bored. Just procedure. Joshua caught the words floating district—once, then not again.
He leaned in. “They know what’s happening below, don’t they?”
Jalen didn’t look at him. “They know. They always have.”
On the dais, a woman raised her hand. Her voice, when it came, was dry silk. “If the rafts continue to multiply unchecked, they’ll threaten the sewage systems along the lower wall. Propose a levy on entry—five silver for every new structure, paid in advance.”
Another nodded. “And limit driftwood imports. Encourage consolidation.” “Seconded.”
“No debate?”
Silence. Then: “Passed.”
A tap of the gavel. Ink on parchment. Law.
Joshua stared. He felt gavel in his chest like a stone dropped in deep water. A boy he remembered—Milo—had just finished building a raft with his sister. Their mother was sick. They’d had no silver. Just nails, tar, and hope.
“They’re not people to them,” he said aloud.
A few heads turned. One of the tribunal members looked down—at Jalen, then at Joshua. “You’re not permitted here,” the woman said. “This chamber is not open to public petition.”
Jalen stepped forward, bowing slightly. “He’s new to the city. A cousin. Curious about how things work.”
The woman’s eyes lingered. Cold as chalk.
“Then let him learn quickly,” she said. “This is not a place for sentiment. It’s where burdens are balanced.”
Joshua wanted to laugh. Or scream. Or rip the ink-stained laws from their books and drag these people down into the marshes where families lived on floating tin and memory.
But he didn’t. He turned and walked out, faster now, heat rising behind his eyes. Jalen caught up with him in the corridor.
“They’re not all monsters,” he said, softly.
Joshua didn’t stop walking. “No. Just cowards with clean hands.”
Outside, the city gleamed under a flawless sky. And below it, past the wall, the floating city breathed—hungry, rising.
They didn’t speak until they reached the bottom of the hill. The white marble gave way to older stone—still polished, but worn thin in places, as if even this city had once remembered weight. The noise of the tribunal faded behind them, replaced by the distant hum of markets, the occasional hawker’s call, sanitized to suit the upper quarters. It was the kind of silence cities wear when they’ve taught themselves to forget.
Joshua stopped beneath a narrow arch and turned to face Jalen.
“You just stood there,” he said.
Jalen didn’t flinch. “What did you want me to do? Pull a knife? They’d bury us both in paperwork and pretend it never happened.”
“That raft tax,” Joshua said, voice rising. “You know what that’ll do. You know who that hurts.” “I do,” Jalen replied, quieter now. “But you’re acting like I passed it. Like I chose it.”
“You stayed,” Joshua snapped. “You work their markets. You carry their crates. You drink their wine. And when they choke the people who raised you, you call it law and look away.”
Jalen looked past him, toward the edge of the sky where the sea glinted—just visible above the rooftops, like something trying to be remembered.
“You think I don’t carry it?” he said. “I wake up every day and walk through rooms I couldn’t have imagined as a child. And every tile, every candle, every full bowl—I ask myself who went without so I could have it. But what’s the alternative, Josh? Stand on the rafts and drown with them? What does that solve?”
“It means not forgetting.”
Jalen shook his head. “You think memory’s enough? They don’t care what we remember. They care what we build. What we threaten. What we cost.”
Joshua stepped forward, shaking now. “Then why not do something real? Speak up. Refuse the crates. Smuggle in medicine. Fight back.”
“I do what I can.”
“You don’t,” Joshua said. “You do what’s safe.”
That landed. Jalen’s jaw set. His eyes burned—not with rage, but shame. Something older, more private.
“You think I’ve forgotten where I came from?” he asked. “I haven’t. I just see it clearer now. The tribunal doesn’t fear anger. It fears disruption. Structure. Organization. You want change? It’s not in shouting at marble walls. It’s in learning how to build your own.”
Joshua stared at him, chest tight.
“So that’s it. You sit in their courts, carry their fruit, and call it strategy.”
“I call it survival,” Jalen said.
“No,” Joshua said, stepping back. “That was the floating city. This—this is surrender.” Jalen didn’t follow.
Joshua turned and walked, fast, not toward the lower gates, but the roads that wound back to the harbor. Toward the cracks in the wall where trade slipped through. Where rot met stone. Where the city ended and the truth began.
In his chest, something settled not anger, not grief, but obligation. Heavy. Cold. Unavoidable. The city had made its choice.
Now he had to make his.
He found the crack in the wall just past the fishmonger’s gate—a path masked by crates and shadow, where stone gave way to old iron grating, rusted through and breathing salt. He ducked low, pressed his palms to the edge, and felt it—sea-wind, thick with brine and smoke. Home.
The first step was hard. The second was heavier.
By the time he passed through and stood on the other side, the sound of the white city was gone. The silence was replaced by the groan of wet rope, the murmur of tired voices, the slap of waves against a thousand floating walls. Rafts stretched in every direction—boards patched with tar and
canvas, tied with fraying rope and prayer. Smoke rose from clay pots. Nets hung like torn flags between shacks. The scent of fish, fire, and filth wrapped around him like an old coat.
He paused, listening. A baby cried. A hammer struck iron. Someone shouted for water. It was all alive.
“Joshua?”
The voice came from behind a curtain of patched sailcloth. An old woman emerged, bent but not broken.
“You’re back,” she said.
He nodded.
She looked him over—boots too clean, shoulders straighter than they’d ever been when he left. “They didn’t keep you, then.”
“No,” he said. “I walked out.”
“Did they offer you a seat?”
“No,” he said again. “Just silence.”
She nodded like that was the answer she expected. “Then you saw enough.”
Others began to notice him—heads turning, whispers soft as wind. He caught flashes of faces he knew: kids grown taller, men missing limbs, women with eyes harder than steel. They watched him with something between curiosity and judgment. He didn’t blame them.
He stepped onto the nearest raft, felt it shift beneath his weight. The movement wasn’t unfamiliar—it was memory. Muscle. Instinct. The wood swayed but held. Like always.
Down the plankwalk, he saw Milo—the boy he remembered—hauling buckets of water to a makeshift cistern. His sister waved without smiling.
Joshua walked. He didn’t speak at first. Just walked, listening. Taking it all back in.
Every cracked board, every hungry face, every ash-streaked pot, every child with ribs showing through shirts too thin for the wind. All of it. And as he walked, something inside him hardened—not into hate, but into shape.
The white city had wealth enough to waste. This city had mouths enough to feed armies.
He reached the central dock—the one where old petitions were nailed to splintering posts—and climbed the crate at its center. People began to gather. Not because he called them, but because they recognized him.
Joshua raised his voice.
“They’ve passed a levy,” he said. “Five silver for every raft built. No warning. No appeal.” A few gasps. Some muttering. Someone cursed.
“They call it law,” he went on. “But it’s theft. It’s a blade aimed at your throat, sharpened in silence.”
He let the words settle. Let the dock groan under their weight.
“They think we won’t push back because we never have. Because we’re scattered. Because we’re poor. But I’ve been inside their walls. I’ve seen their halls, their stores, their tribunals. They fear only one thing—unity.”
He looked around. Saw it—not fire yet, but heat. The first spark.
“We don’t beg,” he said. “We build. We don’t plead. We plan.”
A silence followed. Not passive. Not defeated.
Charged.
The old woman nodded, barely. A man spit into the water and crossed his arms. Milo’s sister moved forward and said, “What do you need?”
Joshua took a breath.
“Wood. Rope. Time. And people who remember we serve no obligation to tall nations.”
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About
TyJheir Shipman is a speculative fiction writer whose work weaves political intrigue with intimate character studies. He explores the quiet philosophies that guide human connection, tracing the fault lines between personal conviction and the greater machinery of power.
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