Salvage Class: The Sounding House

Nessa Pell has helped save her neighborhood. Five familiar skills are gone from her hands, and her new repair cooperative has two borrowed tables and enough money to begin. Then a pressure line beneath the freightwalk brings them a paying question: what is moving at its other end? The line leads to a damaged tide-measuring workshop, where a salvage crew has already bought the loose stock. Nessa needs the old connections preserved long enough to understand them. The other crew needs its wages before the water closes the route. Some things must be taken apart to save them. First, Nessa has to learn which things can survive the journey. Book two of Salvage Class, following The City Beneath the Tide. The complete manuscript contains 24 chapters and 47,551 body words, resolving the Sounding House expedition and its central mystery. Reading book one first is recommended. Content notes: flood and height peril, damaged machinery, economic pressure, and persistent loss of learned abilities. No explicit sexual content or graphic violence. This fiction and its story planning were generated with AI; continuity editing was performed using AI. The cover is AI-generated. Aven Rookwell is a pen name.