“Right,” I said, distracted as I watched her drink. “Well, again, we appreciate it.”
“Appreciation appreciated,” she replied, swallowing her last gulp of water before aiming the bottle at a trashcan.
There was a pause as she leaned back in her chair and clasped her hands together with a sigh. And then she spoke again in a lower tone, and with an odd kind of glimmer in her eyes, “We’re actually the only organization that I know of that engages in outreach the way we do, FYI. So, yeah—you are super lucky that we found you. It’s not like we have unlimited people out there. Plus, these kinds of excursions are a risk to our lives—we can never be sure how each mission will turn out, and some of us have evenlostour lives for the sake of helping strangers. Not to mention the expense! We’re a well-off nation, but it’s not cheap to run monsters like these, let alone several of them, and then there’s all the food, medical assistance, and sometimes even shelter that we provide. Resources don’t just rain from the sky in times like these, do they?” She laughed, then shifted in her chair, straightening her back as she glanced out through the windshield.
I swallowed, frowning slightly. It took me a minute to process not just her words, but her manner. I’d caught a hint of it before, back in the clearing, but it was more blatant to me now—she was a woman with an ego. She spoke with enough pride that she sounded almost smug, and while hers wascertainly a noble line of work—one we’d all be dead without—her tone just struck me as… a little off. I understood the notion of selfless service; it was something we were taught in our community from a young age, to be ready to serve not just our relatives, but anyone who needed help. But it wasn’t something anyone ever thought toboastabout. If you took on a task, you just got on with the job and did it out of duty, not to feel puffed up about it.
Still, it wasn’t like I could fault her for it after what she’d done for us—and to be fair, I had just been thanking her. It just caught me off guard, because it wasn’t an attitude I could relate to.
“So, are you the manager on this airship, or…?” I asked, wanting to change the subject.
“I am Head of Operations of this expedition, yes,” she replied. “And, hey.” She glanced back at me. “I just realized I never caught your name.”
“Oh. Tanisha. Tanisha Lockwood. Everyone calls me Tani, though.”
She gave me a knowing grin. “I shall honor that request.”
“So, where are we heading?” I dared to look back out through the window.
She stood up and moved closer to the glass, squinting as she stared out into the distance.
“Yup!” she announced after a moment. “We’re close enough to see it now! Come here.” She tapped her side, beckoning me over.
I got up and moved next to her, staring straight ahead, trying to see what she saw—and then I spotted it, a black dot in the far distance, which was swiftly becoming larger.
“Is that anisland?” I asked, squinting harder.
She dipped into a cabinet by her feet and pulled out a pair of binoculars: an object I recognized thanks to our museumhaving stocked a pair. These were of course way more modern, with a smooth silver surface and thick rubber grips. She handed them to me, and I pressed them to my eyes, refocusing on the black dot, which was now more like a black smudge.
“Welcome to Fairwell Island,” she announced proudly.
“Fairwell Island,” I murmured.
“Or just Fairwell, for short,” she added.
“That would explain the letters on your uniform?” I asked.
“That’s right. The entire island, and all of its peripheries, make up our great nation. It’s currently home to about sixty thousand Fairwellians.”
Sixty thousand. That sounded like a lot. And… “Fairwellians?” I repeated, finding the term odd. I momentarily lowered the binoculars to look at her.
She chuckled. “That’s the official, if rather antiquated, term for Fairwell’s citizens. A bit of a mouthful, isn’t it? I prefer ‘Fairlanders,’ honestly, which is common use these days, anyway.” She nodded back out of the windscreen. “Keep your eyes out there. You’re about to get an even more spectacular view.”
I did as instructed and turned back toward the window, refocusing the lenses. Sixty thousand really was a lot of people. This place had to be big.
“So Fairwell is where you all live—and it’s also the official base for your philanthropic organization?” I asked.
“That is correct,” Anna replied. “All of our lives and activities revolve around it.”
I went quiet, wanting to focus on the island as the view became clearer and clearer. After about five minutes, it was close enough for me to start making out actual details, and what I saw made my eyes bulge behind the lenses.
The main black smudge I had seen was a massive, mountainous island—and by mountainous, I meant practically thewhole thing was one sprawling, multi-peaked mountain range. It was flattish at the edges, with gradually rising slopes, until it branched out into five imperious peaks, with the highest one being at its center.
There was a lot of greenery, which was a welcome sight, and it seemed to grow around and among buildings that were built into the mountain’s slopes. The settlements appeared thickest on the lower levels, and grew sparser as the slopes grew steeper—and then, right at the central peak was a grand construction that looked like some kind of epic, yet modern castle. That was the only word I could think to give it.
Its exterior appeared to run the entire circumference of the central peak, and its walls were made of regal white stone, into which hundreds of glass windows were carved. They glinted in the sunlight. A dozen or so turrets stretched high around the castle, the tallest of which extended up from the very center of the peak, overlooking the entire island, and atopthatwas a glass-walled observatory—at least, that would have been a logical use for the round, bubble-like structure—the highest point of all. There were other impressive structures built among the lower peaks, but none as breathtaking as that castle one.
And as we drew even closer, I realized what Anna had meant by “peripheries.” Scattered around the mountainous island were eight smaller islands, all of them flat by contrast. They were populated by lower, considerably less impressive buildings, and each islet appeared to be connected to the main island by long, narrow bridges. There was less greenery on the smaller islands, though I couldn’t tell from up here if that was a natural occurrence or just because the construction was heavier on them.
