His right hand was tucked into his jacket’s inside breast pocket. Talis sent a silent prayer to Silus Cutter that she was nearly finished here as she fumbled with the stiff fabric to free his arm.
Frozen fingers were fixed around their prize. They’d have to be broken to reveal what the late captain regarded as precious in his final moments.
Talis wished she hadn’t eaten so recently.
The brittle joints snapped and the icy digits broke off cleanly. The late captain made no complaint, but Talis felt guilt rise along with the bile in her throat. She forced them both back.
“Gods rot it.” The curse came out with a fog of sour breath and crystallized in her scarf before it could collect on the glass of her helmet.
Pressed into the skin of his palm: an iron key. She wasn’t done yet.
She lifted the key by its embroidered cord and gently lowered the captain back to the glass. Crouched on the edge of the cabinet beneath the window and looked around the cabin.
In her own quarters back on Wind Sabre, she had several hidden compartments. Some were easier to find; those were the decoys. The less obvious were for her real valuables. Though The Empress was no smuggler’s vessel, chances were fair that this captain had been of a mind with her. She turned her shoulder lamp to shine it along the walls, and it went out.
The panic that gripped her throat in the dark kept her from cursing. She fumbled with the power pack on her belt, flipping up its crank and spinning it under the palm of her hand to spare her numb fingers. The bulb flickered after a moment and came back on, and she could breathe again. Almost done, she promised herself as she re-secured the crank. Look sharp.
There. A wall panel over the captain’s curtained bunk. A square, unnecessary seam in the bulkhead, revealed by the tilted angle of the drapes. Cast a shadow that told her one side was raised higher than the other. She jumped for it, over a pile of the captain’s belongings that would have swallowed her up to her knees. The ship lurched as she landed.
“Almost done,” she said out loud this time.
The sally bar pried up the panel without a fuss. Behind it, a cast-iron door was installed in the bulkhead, unmarked except for a small keyhole. The dead captain’s key made for a neat match. It resisted turning at first, but she pressed it harder and it slid a last tiny bit into the lock. If she’d had a hand free—and no helmet on—she would have tugged her own prayerlocks for luck. Instead she bit her lip and turned. She felt the barrel inside move, and inhaled a gasp of anticipation.
With a cold, harsh tink, the key broke off in the lock.
Talis let out a string of expletives that would have made Tisker blush and grabbed her blowtorch.
“No you don’t,” she informed the safe. “I’m done with this place.”
The fuel tank ran out just as the frozen safe door expanded with the bang of flexing metal. She flinched as the door popped free of its casing. Nothing explosive, but her glass-faced helmet had her cautious. Bracing her knees against the angled bulkhead, she gripped the edge of the door and the stump of the broken key, and pulled the safe open.
As she tallied it, she had to be using up the last of her luck.
A neat stack of documents bound with Imperial golden ribbon topped the pile of contents within. Beneath that hid a diminutive single-shot powder pistol—a captain’s last defense should he be forced to open the safe against his will. And in the safe’s back corner: a small blue velvet bag cinched with a white silk cord. She was so eager to be clear of this place, she forgot to be disappointed not to find a bonus of gold coin to pad the payoff from the contract.
Loosened and upended, the velvet bag produced a masculine pewter signet ring. It was scratched and pitted. The pearls set to either side of the worn seal were chipped, the seal itself unreadable. It was beyond the ability of even a Breaker jeweler’s skill to repair. By her experienced appraisal, it was worthless.
It was exactly what she was looking for.
Talis tucked the ring back into its bag and tucked the bag into one of the cargo pouches on the outside thigh of her descent suit.
Her heartbeat pulsed faster in her ears. Time to get off this damned ship.
Engaging the motor on her lead line to speed her climb, Talis made her way back out of the captain’s cabin, up the sloping middle deck, through the ice-glazed forecastle, and back out the hatch.
She slipped a foot into the stirrup of the descent line. Clipped the voice tube back into her helmet.
To her breathless hail, Dug replied tersely, “Got crowded up here, Captain.”
Talis felt the ice reach her gut as she craned her head back. Two shadows dwarfed Wind Sabre in the sky above. The first was an airship similar in design to hers, but twice as large, and without any pretense of stealth. Its crisp canvas lift balloon and gold-painted hull gleamed with self-importance. A Cutter Imperial patroller. It was tied off alongside a completely foreign shape that Talis only recognized from newspaper illustrations: the round, balloon-less Yu’Nyun exploration ship.
The two vessels huddled together as if sharing a secret.
Someone knew something, for sure. No way coincidence put both those ships right there, right then.
She felt the line tighten and she began to ascend.
Chapter 2
The line reeled Talis up toward Wind Sabre’s curving bulk. She knew every dent and nick in the wooden airship, every scratch in the paint, like the lines of her own scars. Experience, proof of being alive.
The ship’s size
