# The Frequency Thieves
The sky is doing that thing again where it forgets which way is down, and honestly, I'm here for it—that peculiar lurch in your stomach when gravity decides to take a coffee break. I've spent the last three years as a Frequency Reader for the sky-city's Navigation Authority, which means I'm one of the few humans who can hear what the alien sky-dwellers are saying, who can translate the ancient magic that keeps this place suspended between worlds. It's dangerous work. It's also the only work that matters.
"You're spiralling," Echo says, and there's that tenderness in their voice, the one that means they're not annoyed, just gently suggesting that my internal monologue has achieved escape velocity again.
"I prefer the term 'ascending,'" I shoot back, watching the sky-city's crystalline spires hum their usual welcome-home frequency, that sound like glass singing, like the universe's most beautiful migraine. The colour is all wrong today though—should be that prismatic silver-blue, the one that makes your teeth ache with recognition, but it's... dimmer. Muffled somehow, like someone's turned the volume down on reality's stereo system and forgot to tell me about it.
Echo catches my hand—always does when the weightlessness gets too philosophical—and pulls me toward the observation deck. We're suspended between cloud layers, the sky-city hanging here like a thought someone had and then forgot to finish, all impossible architecture and gravity that's more suggestion than law. Below us, the clouds roil in that dizzying way that makes your eyes water if you stare too long, all bruised purples and storm-greys and colours that have no name because naming them would make them real.
"The creatures are quiet," Echo observes, and they're right—that's the thing that's been needling at me since we docked. The sky-city should be *alive* with that chittering communication, that frequency-weaving that the alien creatures use to navigate the updrafts and downdrafts, the invisible highways carved from sound. But right now it's like listening to a radio station that's slowly tuning itself off-frequency, and—
Oh.
"Someone's masking the spires," I say, and it comes out like a prayer, or maybe a curse, all the air leaving my lungs at once. "The frequencies. They're *masking* them."
Echo's grip tightens on my hand. "How many sky-dwellers are caught in the lower clouds right now?"
"Don't know," I say, which is code for *too many*, which is code for *we're about to do something reckless and it's going to be magnificent and terrible*. "But the creatures aren't humming the safe passages anymore. They're just—" I reach out with that part of my mind that tastes alien languages, that ancient magic that lets me commune with things that shouldn't exist, and there's fear there, pure and electric and wrong. The creatures are afraid. They're *confused*.
The sky-city shivers around us, and suddenly down is sideways is up is down again, and my stomach does that beautiful terrible flip that reminds me I'm alive and probably about to die in the most inconvenient way possible.
"Come on," I say, already moving, already pulling Echo toward the spire-nexus at the city's heart. The weightlessness is working in our favour now, all that impossible gravity letting us push off from non-existent surfaces and soar through air that tastes like ozone and secrets. "We need to find whoever's jamming the signal before—"
The sky opens up.
A section of cloud layer simply *ceases to exist*, revealing the roiling darkness beneath. Something ancient and many-limbed rises through the gap like a memory you didn't know you'd forgotten, vast and hungry.
I'm laughing—because of course. Of course there's a creature down there that shouldn't exist this high in the atmosphere. Of course it's been deliberately lured here by the frequency masking. Of course the sky-city has just become a hunting ground.
"That's worse than your usual Tuesday," Echo says, voice steady.
The creature—I can taste its name now—is called something like *Void-Singer*, and it's been drawn here by the absence of the protective frequencies. Someone deliberately dimmed the spires. Someone *wanted* this.
The sky-city's gravity stutters. It's not the usual dance—it's panicked, struggling, like the creature's presence is eating the gravitational stability. Around us, the clouds shift colour—bruised purple bleeding into sickly yellow—and I can feel the vulnerable sky-dwellers beginning to fall.
"I need to reach the spire-nexus," I tell Echo. "I need to amplify the creature's voice."
"That's insane."
"Devastatingly so," I agree, launching myself through the weightless air toward the city's heart.
The spire-nexus thrums beneath my hands, and I press my consciousness into its crystalline heart. There's something there—something deliberate. A frequency-dampener woven through the spires like a parasite. And beneath it, I feel something else: a signature. Someone I *know*. Someone who trained here. Someone who understands exactly how vulnerable the sky-dwellers are because I taught them.
Marin.
My former apprentice. My friend. The betrayal hits harder than any creature could.
I reach for that part of my magic that tastes like broken trust, and I *sing*. Not with my voice—that would be insufficient—but with the deepest part of myself. I sing the Void-Singer's true name into the spires, amplify it until it echoes through every crystalline tower, until it becomes *undeniable*.
The creature stops. It becomes almost *conscious*, almost *present*.
The frequencies snap back to life—that prismatic silver-blue rushing through the spires like relief—and the gravity settles. The clouds cease their roiling and solidify into safety.
And I'm falling, because gravity remembers me at precisely the wrong moment.
Echo catches me.
Their arms around me are solid and real and *present* in a way that reminds me that not all betrayals are inevitable, that sometimes the fragile things don't break.
"Don't," Echo whispers, and I realise I'm shaking. "Don't go somewhere dark right now. Just... stay here. With me. In this moment."
And I do. I stay suspended in that weightless sanctuary, held by someone who knows me, really *knows* me, and the sky-city hums its grateful song around us, and the clouds below shift through colours that shouldn't exist.
I just breathe.
