Pride. Yeah.
“She’s gonna come smack up against a real surprise when she finds out what it takes to captain a ship. It’s more than the paperwork saying the deck under your feet belongs to you.”
“She knows that.” Tisker loaded the full tray into the dumbwaiter in the aft bulkhead, cranked the handle to tighten its springs, and flipped the toggle to send it all rattling to the deck below. While it jostled and clanked, he turned back to her and buried his hands in his pockets. It only made him look younger.
“Seems to conveniently forget it whenever I gotta make a decision between keeping the engines polished or keeping us going.”
As soon as the words left her mouth, Talis knew how inane they sounded. If she let the engines fail, she wasn’t keeping them going at all. Poor phrasing. Gods-rotted rum. Maybe she shouldn’t worry so much about restocking the treacherous amber liquid.
She got up, pushed her chair back under the table, and stood with her hands on the back of it. Keeping her steady. Her head was starting to swim.
“Not something you have to worry about today,” she said to Tisker. And to herself.
He gave her a small smile. Nothing convincing, though, as he said goodnight and left her cabin.
Chapter 9
Subrosa was not a safe place.
Forget for a moment the cutpurses, gangs, and dark alleys—even the questionable food. The black-market city itself was held together with little more than willpower, descending in hastily constructed layers from the underbelly of Rosa, the island proper.
The proximity of Rosa to Bone skies at the seventy-third-degree border made it a convenient place to conduct trade between the two peoples. As a result, the population of Rosa had boomed. The original city had grown up, then out, and then finally over the cliffs and under. Once the undercity was formed, citizens of all five of Peridot’s races found their way there, settling into their own businesses for their own reasons. Cutter folk, no matter how prejudiced, made up the most populous customer base on the planet. And they wanted all sorts of goods and services.
The first layer of Subrosa anchored to the rocks jutting out beneath the island, and each subsequent layer clung desperately to the one above. Cobbled together from whatever building material was available: corrugated metal, polyboard, concrete reinforced with metal mesh, wooden planks, old cargo crates, and other things less identifiable due to their age and condition. Materials were cannibalized from other structures when nothing new was available. Shops and offices grew like tumors, entrepreneurs always building new kiosks that blocked the flow of traffic and forced detours and reroutes. At every intersection, graffiti and handwritten signs were updated daily, attempting to lead customers along the best route to any location. Coded symbols and glyphs did the same for the subcity’s gangs. With the map’s ever-changing arrangement, the layers of paint and posted bills encroached more and more upon the already narrow and claustrophobic passages.
The chaos became the spirit of the city. It was a haven for unsanctioned business in all its varying categories. Shops proffered a vast array of items with the potential to get their new owners in trouble. Assassins mingled with smugglers in the bars and brothels. Orphans and beggars worked for crime lords, or for merchants. Sometimes both. Anyone who would feed them more than they could steal for themselves (which they also continued to do). Talented buskers were forced to hone new skills to build up their worth in this place.
And then there were the cutpurses, gangs, and dark alleys. Not to mention the questionable food.
After mulling the decision into a spiral, Talis scraped the bottom of the ship’s coffers and paid extra for an enclosed docking berth. It would earn Wind Sabre unwanted attention from within the city. Only those who were worth a bounty or carrying a fortune bothered to pay the extra to have their presence at the docks hidden from those vessels circling outside. But she didn’t want their nose tied in and their tail-end exposed if The Serpent Rose made quick work of their repairs and caught up to them. Talis hoped the fact that she didn’t pay the optional bribe to the dock manager for his silence—sometimes silence was louder than rumors—would be enough to counter the news that a familiar ship had arrived seeking an uncharacteristic level of privacy.
The arching frame of the dock’s outer gate slid past their lift balloon, and the yellow-green glow from the station’s interior lighting bathed them in a jaundiced hue that could make even a brand new ship look poorly maintained. The sounds and smells of Subrosa enveloped them. The lively pulse of drums and wailing from brass instruments played with more enthusiasm than skill clamored out from the restaurants that lined the docking levels. The breath of stale alcohol mingled with the aroma of fresh, hot anything and everything. The walls thrummed as thousands of feet moved along the many levels above and below, all sending their vibrations through the layers of the city. Dust and loose debris pattered down to bounce on the docks or fall past into the depths of the enclosed bay. Voices carried from every direction, a range of dialects arguing over prices, quality, schedules, or other contested terms. Dockside machinery complained of overuse with minimal maintenance as it loaded and unloaded cargo to slowly tow it through the crowds to its destination. Beneath that, the sound of the dock’s central furnace lungs, squeezed by regular pumps of steel bellows, was an ever-present pulse, sending puffs of hot air through sealed canvas tubes across the gantries at each occupied berth, keeping the lift balloons of transient ships inflated while they refueled or repaired. Grease, tar, and oil from the docking apparatus mingled with
