Zibiah’s gaze drifted from the incriminating manifest in her hand to the lingering grit of the sand-golem on the floor, then to the heavy, scarred steel of the main entrance. Qasim had already stepped toward the threshold, fingers tracing the faint scorch marks. “Bolted from without,” Zibiah murmured, her voice flat. “He planned on picking through the rubble.” Qasim didn’t respond directly, instead producing a set of thin, gleaming lockpicks from a hidden pouch on his belt. With practiced grace, he inserted them into the damaged mechanism, his ear pressed close to the cold metal. The soft clicks were the only sound in the cavernous room for a long minute. Then, with a definitive thunk, the heavy bolts retracted. The door, still slightly warped, creaked inward. Before Zibiah could even register the sudden ingress of the outside world, a high-pitched wail echoed through the threshold. Shirin, her face blotchy and tear-streaked, stumbled into the open doorway, clutching Zibiah’s infamous wedding urn like a lifeline. Her usually pristine silk dress was rumpled, and her hair, typically a carefully arranged cascade, clung in damp strands to her cheeks. “Zibiah!” Shirin choked out, her voice thick with snot and accusation. “You have to take this back! It’s… it’s been absolutely ghastly!” Zibiah pinched the bridge of her nose. “Ghastly, Shirin? It’s a decorative pot. What exactly did it do, threaten your pet marmoset?” “It called me unseasoned porridge!” Shirin wailed, thrusting the urn forward with such force that Zibiah nearly fumbled it. “Every morning! For three days! ‘Oh, look, it’s the unseasoned porridge, bland and watery, just like Rostam’s latest business venture.’ And then yesterday it said I had the personality of a wet sponge left in a back alley! A wet sponge!” Qasim let out a dry huff, masked as a cough. Zibiah weighed the vessel in both palms; its base dragged unevenly to the left. It wasn’t just the alchemical enchantment for the voice. There was something else, a dense, cold core. “Porridge, you say?” Zibiah mused, her fingers probing the ornate filigree at the urn’s bottom. “Well, at least it wasn’t wrong.” She twisted a small, disguised latch she’d incorporated into the design, a mechanism no one else would know. With a soft click, a small, hollow compartment sprang open. Inside, nestled on a bed of velvet, lay a translucent, palm-sized shard of pure obsidian, humming with a faint, internal light. A sound-thief glass. A charged, active phonograph cylinder. Shirin, oblivious, continued her lament. “And Rostam! He just sits there! He tries to argue with it, and it just tells him he’s going to end up selling watered-down spiced wine in the slums! It’s ruining everything!” Zibiah ignored her, turning the sliver toward the furnace glow. Not her brasswork, and not her glyphs. Someone had tucked it into the urn while it sat in the Vahdat parlor. She depressed the trigger pin with a thumb. A low, distorted hum filled the air, quickly resolving into voices, muffled but clear enough. *“—just a matter of time before her spirit breaks completely, my dear Rostam. Five years was merely a taste. The humiliation, the isolation… she’ll crawl back. She always does.”* The voice was Farzin’s. Calm, silken, utterly devoid of warmth. Zibiah did not move. Beside her, Qasim's knuckles whitened against his wrench. *“But… she seems so vibrant now, Farzin,”* Rostam’s whiny voice drifted from the crystal. *“She’s building that ridiculous dreadnought. And that artificer, Al-Masri, he’s always around.”* Farzin’s laugh, low and chilling, followed. *“A brief flare. A last gasp of defiance. She thrives on challenge, yes, but her greatest weakness, her profound need for loyalty, will be her undoing. I simply remove her supports, one by one. She has no one left but me. And once she realizes that, once her genius is truly dependent on my ‘generosity,’ she will be mine. Completely. Her white moonlight will only ever shine for me. The airship? A glorious cage, built by her own hands for her own containment. I just need to make sure the maiden voyage… it has a very specific kind of guest list.”* The dark prism sputtered out, the resonance dying in the core. Shirin, who had finally quieted, looked between Zibiah’s ashen face and the inert obsidian shard with a confused frown. “What was that?” But Zibiah didn’t hear her. The polished obsidian felt like ice in her palm, but her blood boiled. Five years. Her exile. Her struggle. All of it, a calculated performance. A deliberate breaking. Not just of her career, but of *her*. For three seconds, no clever retort surfaced. Her fingers twitched around the obsidian prism, skin cold against the metal trim. Qasim was beside her in an instant, his hands on her shoulders, his voice a low rumble. “Zibiah. Look at me.” She didn’t. The five years of ledger audits, the stalled guild charters, the quiet sabotage—every ledger line snapped into an audit she had failed to run on her own ledger. “He…” Her voice was a ragged whisper. “He took everything. He took *me*.” She let out a dry, harsh bark that sounded like stripping gears. She didn't weep; Zibiah Tariq had buried her capacity for theatrical sobs under three crates of burning black-powder years ago. Instead, she leaned a shoulder against Qasim's arm, steadying her boots against the grit. “It’s not just an airship anymore,” she said, her voice dropping to a gravelly purr. “He planned a cage. I'll make sure he's the one sitting inside when the ballast blows.” Qasim met her stare, a sharp, feral grin touching the corner of his mouth. “I have twelve barrels of high-grade phosphorite in my cellar,” he said. “If we're redesigning the keel.” “The flagship,” she corrected, tucking the sliver into her vest pocket. “We finish it. And it will be the most beautiful, the most magnificent machine this city has ever seen. Right up until the moment it isn’t.” Shirin, still clutching the urn, finally piped up again. “So, are you taking this back, or…?” Before Zibiah could snap a reply, the heavy workshop doors, which Qasim had just opened, swung inward further with a faint groan. Standing in the entrance, a warm, affable smile gracing his lips, was Farzin. He wore robes of opulent crimson and gold, his usual air of effortless charm radiating outward. He looked around the vast space, his gaze settling on the partially assembled skeleton of the *Vanguard’s Ascent*, its polished skeleton of electrum-infused timber gleaming under the high sun-lamps. “Ah, Zibiah, my dear,” he said, his voice as smooth as polished jade. “I knew I’d find you here. The city is abuzz with your latest spectacle.” He stepped further into the room, his eyes sweeping over the grand structure. “It’s beautiful, Zibiah… it’s a shame the maiden voyage requires a blood sacrifice.”

The Mid-Flight Reversal