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By the time Briar reached the ferry, daylight was as full as it was going to get. The sky was coated in a mold-gray film, but there was sun enough filtering through the clouds that she could see a tree-covered island across the water.
Here and there a dome-shaped thing would rise above the trees. Even at this distance, she could see the airships docked and waiting for crews or cargo.
The ferry creaked and dipped when she stepped onto it. There were few other passengers at such an early hour, and she was the only woman. Wind swept off the waves and tugged at her hat, but she held it down, low over her eyes. If anyone recognized her, no one bothered her. Maybe it was the rifle, and maybe it was the way she stood, feet apart with her hands on the rail.
Maybe nobody cared.
Most of her fellow passengers were sailors of one kind or another. Folks on this island either worked the airships or the boats at the pier, because when an airship unloaded on the island, some other means of transport had to take it over the water and into town.
It had never occurred to her to wonder why there were no airship docks any closer to the Outskirts, but now she did wonder, and she could make a guess or two. The rambling, sketchy conclusions she drew bolstered her hopes that they kept away from the public eye for shady reasons. As far as she was concerned, the shadier the better.
After over an hour of bobbing awkwardly across the tide, the creaky, white-painted ferry tied itself to the docks on the far shore.
Side by side the landing areas were pressed up against one another—the wooden piers with their brittle armor of barnacles down at the water line, and the cleared-out lots with great iron pipes that jutted up, out, and back down deep into the earth. A dozen airships in varying states of repair and quality were moored to the pipes, affixed via sets of brass lobster-claw clips as big as barrels.
The ships themselves came in assorted designs. Some were little more than hot air balloons with baskets held up low and close to the balloon’s underbelly; and some were more impressive, with buckets that looked like the hull of a water-running vessel—but built onto a hydrogen tank and propelled with steam thrusters.
Briar had never been to Bainbridge. Unsure of where to start, she stood in the middle of a landing where even the tradesmen were only just
beginning to bustle. She watched as the crews arrived and as men shifted cargo from bucket to cart, and then from cart to boat.
The process wasn’t smooth, but it managed to move the incoming products from air to water in a quickly clicking cycle.
Before long, one of the smaller airships gave a lurch, and two crewmembers slid down the mooring ropes to disengage the docking clips. The clasps unhinged and swung free, and the men scrambled back up the ropes into the bucket. From there, they reeled the clips up to the vessel’s edge and hung them around the exterior.
An older man in a captain’s hat paused near Briar to light a pipe.
She asked him, “Excuse me, but which of these ships is going closest to the Seattle wall?”
He gave her a knobby-browed glare over the pipe, summing her up as he sucked at the stem. He said, “You’re on the wrong side of the island for that kind of question, missy. ”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means you should take that road there. ” And he used the pipe to point at a muddy, flattened trail that disappeared back through the trees. “Walk as far as it’ll take you. You might find someone who can answer you better. ”
She hesitated, her arm on her satchel because she felt the need to hold something. Another airship was unlocking itself from the pipework dock, and a new one was hovering over the lot. On the side of the airborne ship she saw a name painted, and then she realized it was a company name, not a ship name.
“Ma’am,” the man called to her.
Briar returned her attention to him and caught the way his gaze flicked from her belt buckle to her eyes.
He continued. “The island’s not that big. It won’t take you long to find your way over to the… alternate commercial row, if that’s what you’re looking to do. ”
She thanked him, considered the muddy stretch of semi-road, and said, “You’re very kind. ”
He replied, “No, but I do my best to be fair. ”
Someone nearby called a name, and the man in the hat responded to it with a wave and a nod. Briar looked at the trail again and noticed that no one else was walking it.
She wasn’t sure if nonchalance or outright sneaking was called for, so she tried to meld the two into a quiet retreat that took her up a slight hill and out to the overgrown path with its deep ruts.
The tops of the ruts were drier. She tiptoed across them and up through the trees, out of sight of the docks. The woods had never been a comfortable place for Briar: she was a city child born and bred, and the wide-trunked walls of bark and brush made her feel small and anxious, as if she were trapped in a fairy tale with wolves.
She tripped up the way, trying hard to keep her heels from sticking in the thick, wet surface. As she scaled the rolling landscape the trail became wider and clearer, but she still saw no one else coming or going along it.
“But it’s early yet,” she said to herself.
The trees were higher the farther back she wandered, and the forest was thicker the deeper she hiked into the heart of the island… which was why she didn’t realize she’d found another set of airship docks until she was nearly in their midst.
