Phoebus Kane: Before the Sky

prequel vignette of Phoebus Kane

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It began not in the clouds, but in a trench beneath a freeway off-ramp outside Albuquerque. That was where Phoebus Kane lived—if “living” meant tracing shadows across brick dust, guarding a duffel bag like it held his name, and waiting for the dawn to reset his failures.

Once, he'd had a name stitched into a uniform—Corporal P. Kane, U.S. Army Combat Engineering Corps. He built roads no one drove on and bridges for convoys that never returned. He learned how to dismantle a drone with his eyes closed and how to read topography like it whispered secrets. But when he came back stateside, the war didn’t. It followed him like smoke trapped in his hair.

A court battle swallowed his savings. A faulty design. A fall guy. Him. His wife Rachel took their daughter Emma and disappeared into a safer, quieter suburb he could never afford. He sent birthday cards anyway—each one returned, unopened, like a boomerang made of guilt.

He once tried to build a mobile shelter—a rudimentary flying capsule out of discarded HVAC parts and a scrapped gyrocopter engine. He called it The Chimera, and it flew for twenty-two seconds before the tail rotor snapped and Phoebus broke his collarbone. That was the night the other squatters in the trainyard began calling him “Icarus.”

Then came the flyer. It was taped to a lamppost near the Salvation Army soup line. One of those ridiculous things you usually tear off for the laugh: WANTED: Skyhome Builder – Must not be afraid of gravity, commitment, or catastrophe. At the bottom, just a name: Harry.

The first meeting was at dawn in a decomposing hangar on the coast. Phoebus had walked sixty-eight miles to get there, limping the last twelve. Harry Atkins looked him up and down—military scars, duffel bag full of tangled blueprints, the burn mark on his neck from a failed hydrogen test—and nodded.

“You already jumped,” Harry had said.

“I hit the ground.”

Harry offered him a seat and flipped an hourglass. Fifteen minutes. No resume. No second chance.

Phoebus didn’t speak for the first five.

Then he began talking. About ballast weight, altitudinal pivot points, wind shear prediction models. He quoted the Bernoulli Principle in the same breath as a Navajo proverb. He spoke like someone who’d stared at the bottom long enough to understand flight as more than science—it was penance.

By the time the last grain fell, Harry leaned back.

“You’re hired,” he said. “But don’t get comfortable. This thing we’re building—it doesn’t land.”

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Final Line of Sand:

That night, Phoebus slept indoors for the first time in years, curled beside a half-assembled drone and a mess of tangled copper wires. He didn’t know it yet, but the sky had already accepted him. Not for redemption. Not for glory. But because the sky, too, is full of wreckage—and it needed someone who could survive among its ghosts.

And just beyond the hangar’s flickering floodlight, a storm was building—one that wouldn't touch ground.

Not yet.

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