Written in the style of A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine:

Jean had been aboard luftnoughts often enough to know she would hate the experience of riding one again. Her aeronaut’s career had started aboard the Malocco: two hundred tonnes of steel levitated into the sky, stuffed full of narrow corridors and crew quarters so tiny they seemed an afterthought. Dim lighting, howling wind, claustrophobic gangplanks; nothing but the occasional porthole to remind her she was in the open sky, as opposed to a metal box buried beneath the dirt. It had been the opposite of flying. When she transferred to flugcraft, her primary motivation had been so that she could breathe again.