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Welcome to A Bedtime Story. I'm Matthew Mitchell, and tonight's story is titled The Weight of the World, Part 1 of this week's series: The Case of the Vanishing Gravity.

Cletus Vance was not the kind of private investigator who walked down rain-slicked alleys with a collar turned up against the wind. Mostly because in Orbit City, it rarely rained, and when it did, the water tended to fall upward before deciding which way was actually down. Cletus preferred his office, which was located on the forty-second floor of a building that leaned slightly to the left, much like his own moral compass on a Friday afternoon. His office was filled with things that didn't work, including a coffee machine that only produced steam and a clock that ticked in reverse. He spent most of his days watching the city from his window, observing the flying commuters and the occasional stray balloon that had escaped a birthday party.

He was currently staring at a fly that seemed to be having a mid-life crisis on his desk when the door creaked open. Or rather, the door opened, and a woman drifted through the top half of the frame. She wasn't walking. She was hovering about four feet off the carpet, clutching a very heavy, very leather-bound dictionary to her chest like a life preserver. Her name was Beatrice Thorne, and she looked like she had spent the last hour fighting a losing battle with a ceiling fan. Her hair was a chaotic mess of curls, and her eyes were wide with a mixture of terror and deep annoyance.

"Mr. Vance, I presume," Beatrice said, her voice trembling as she bumped gently against the ceiling light fixture. "I have a bit of a situation. I woke up this morning and found that the floor had become a suggestion rather than a rule."

Cletus leaned back in his chair, which groaned in sympathy. "Most people pay extra for that kind of experience at the amusement parks, Miss Thorne. Why bring your lack of terrestrial loyalty to me?"

"Because it is only happening to me," she replied, using the dictionary to pivot her body so she was facing him upside down. "My cat is perfectly grounded. My furniture is staying exactly where I left it. But the moment I let go of this dictionary, I am going to end up as a permanent fixture in the stratosphere. I managed to tie myself to my bed to get dressed, but I can't live my life as a human balloon. I tried to walk to the store for milk, and I ended up clinging to a lamp post for twenty minutes until a very confused dog walker helped me down."

Cletus stood up and circled her. He pulled a small magnifying glass from his pocket, though he mostly used it to look professional rather than to actually see anything better. He noticed a small, flickering blue light attached to the heel of her left shoe. It was no larger than a grain of rice, but it hummed with a frequency that made his teeth ache. It was a high-pitched, digital whine that suggested someone had spent a lot of time perfecting a way to be irritating.

"You have been tagged," Cletus remarked, reaching up to snag the shoe. "This is a gravity-guzzler. It is a very illegal, very annoying piece of technology that reroutes the localized gravitational field of a specific target and sends it somewhere else. Effectively, someone is stealing your weight. They aren't just making you light; they are physically pulling the earth's attraction away from your atoms and funneling it into a storage battery."

"Who would want to steal my weight?" Beatrice asked, sounding offended. "I work at the library. I am the least heavy person I know, metaphorically speaking. I spend my days sorting ancient manuscripts and shushing teenagers. I don't have any enemies, unless you count the person who keeps returning books with jam on the pages."

"In Orbit City, weight is energy," Cletus explained, walking back to his desk to find a tool. "If someone can harvest the gravitational pull of a hundred people, they can power a small stadium or a very large, very loud party. It is a clean, albeit highly unethical, power source. The question is not who wants your weight, but where is it going? These devices have a limited range. The collector must be within a few miles of your home."

He tugged at the device with a pair of pliers, but it was fused to the leather. He realized that if he removed it here, Beatrice would simply rocket through his roof. The guzzler was acting as a magnet in reverse, and without the dictionary, she was practically weightless. He needed to find the source and reverse the flow to ensure she didn't become a permanent satellite. He grabbed a roll of heavy-duty industrial tape from his drawer and began taping several lead paperweights from his desk to Beatrice's belt.

"This should keep you at a manageable altitude for now," he said, stepping back to admire his handiwork. "We are going to the Low-G Lounge. It is a dive bar in the basement of the city, and it is the only place where people talk about gravity theft without calling the police. It is also the only place where the drinks are served in sealed pouches so they don't float away."

Beatrice descended slowly until her toes touched the carpet. She let out a breath she seemed to have been holding since breakfast. "Thank you, I think. I feel like a very heavy fisherman, but at least I am not staring at your lightbulbs anymore. But how do we find the thief in a city of millions?"

Cletus grabbed his coat and adjusted his hat. "We follow the hum. Every guzzler is connected to a master hub. If we can tune into that frequency, it will lead us straight to the person who thinks your gravity is their personal battery pack. And we hope we find them before they decide to harvest the gravity of the entire building. If that happens, this dictionary won't be enough to keep us from a very cold, very quiet trip to the moon. And I personally hate the moon; the lack of atmosphere makes for terrible acoustics."

They stepped out of the office and into the hallway. Cletus watched the blue light on her shoe. It was pulsing faster now, reacting to something nearby. The mystery was just beginning, and Cletus could feel the familiar itch of a case that was going to be much more complicated than a simple technical glitch. He led the way to the elevator, wondering if the cables were still rated for people who weighed as much as a feather, or if they would find themselves stuck between floors in a world where down was no longer a certainty.