Shadow Road Page 2

  Then we would both be crazy. What joy.

  ~~~

  Luxfenestre: a foldable watertight window made of diamond-shaped panes of carbon glass.

  Nimkoruguithu (nim-cor-oo-gwith-oo): Also referred to as Nim K; the largest city in the Coalition Colonial Region, a rough, nearly lawless place too far from Coalition influence to be kept properly under heel. More information found in the Endnotes.

  Lordstown-over-the Isle, Adropedes Islands (ah-drop-pih-deez): A city built across a string of small islands reaching out from the northern end of the Edonian mainland; the last stop before sailing across the Marral Sea to the colonies.

  Porte De Darre (poor-tuh deh dah-reh); abrev. P.d.D.

  2. Accidental Encounter

  3rd of Uirra, Continued

  Prattle's was sure to be open at that hour, so I went there first, flying through the aisles without letting myself get sidetracked by the exotic knick-knacks and curiosities the place was famous for. It took too many precious minutes, but I found a mending kit and a few other things, then nearly overpaid the grumpy store-clerk before rushing next door.

  The gaslight was on behind the 'Open' sign, and I heaved a sigh of relief as I took the broad stairs to the front entrance of the Post. Like any normal person would, I stepped up to the switch panel and pressed the enter toggle, then moved to the left to be in front of the doors when they accordioned apart.

  At the same instant that I stepped left, someone manually yanked the doors open from the inside and came storming out, and in the blink of an eye I went from walking politely into the Post, to slamming into a large, solid person who was also slamming into me.

  For one flurry of a second all I could see was dark blue wool and a metal greatcoat clasp. Then there was a masculine grunt of annoyance somewhere above my head, and the next instant I was lifted like a post and set neatly out of the way, while Mr. Large-and-Solid continued down the stairs two at a time and went striding off down the boardwalk.

  My mouth was hanging agape.

  I let out my breath on a "Hah!"

  Then I realized I wasn't holding the packet of things I had just bought and looked down.

  The mending kit was at my feet, the tin of seaman's balm to my left, my wax-and-charcoal sketching sticks scattered about. With a frustrated groan I began gathering everything up, scooping my mending kit out of the slush, shaking dirty snow off my sketch sticks and the tin of balm. Then, shooting a narrow-eyed glare in the direction Mr. Solid had taken, I hurried into the Post.

  It wasn't until I reached the Sender's Due counter that I bothered to reach into my cloak pocket for the letter. My fingers didn't find an envelope. "How in all..." I checked the other pocket, but there was no question. They were both empty. I took a breath. Then another. Tried to remember where I had last had it. Went through my items from Prattles. Checked my jacket pocket even though it was much too small.

  The woman behind the counter was watching me expectantly. "Will you be sending anything today?"

  At a loss, I glanced at the timekeep on the far wall. Thanks to Mr. Solid there wasn't even time to dash off another quick note. The Galvania wasn't going to wait for one little passenger, and Father couldn't afford to stay at an inn until the next boat to Lordstown.

  Throat burning, I shook my head, turned around and left, breaking into an unladylike run as soon as I reached the boardwalk.

  My father was standing at the entrance to the gangway. When he saw me coming, he pointed at me, obviously begging the boarding conductor to keep the gate open. Running as fast as I could, I tossed aside all decorum to make it aboard that blasted ship. I let out a bitter laugh as I hurtled up the gangway and came to a puffing, panting, inglorious halt on the main deck.

  Father was only a step behind, thanking the sailor at the end of the boarding ramp before following me to where I stood with my hands on my ribs, trying to catch my breath.

  "What were you doing? Do you know —" He realized he was nearly shouting and grabbed my arm, dragging me over to the railing, as if that would somehow provide privacy from the dozens of other passengers gathered on the deck.

  "Do you have any idea how worried I was?" He hissed, bending to put his face close to mine. "All of our belongings have already been loaded! What if you had been a minute more? We would have been stuck here with nothing but the clothes on our backs while everything we own sailed off for Lordstown! And that is nothing compared to not knowing where you were, or if something had happened to you —”

  "I'm fine, Father," I got out, still a bit winded. "I am here, you are here, and we and our belongings are all heading to the same... distant... place," my voice broke and I had to look away, my emotions getting the better of me.

  Father studied me. Then, abruptly, he asked, "Did someone stop you? Is that what took so long? Did you talk to anyone?"

  "What? No!" A hot blush began creeping up my neck as I fumbled for something that would derail this particular line of questioning. "I just ran into someone outside the Post Office —”

  "Man or woman?"

  "A man, but he didn't —"

  Father's words were quick. Hard. "Did this man say who he was, or ask where we were going?"

  A stranger was wearing my father's body. Two weeks ago, he wouldn't have been asking those questions. He would have laughed. Perhaps expressed concern for the man while teasing me about doing a thing well the first time. A peculiar chill of apprehension slid down my spine. "No." I glanced around, smiling at a curious elderly couple a few yards away. "He was just some poor fellow in a hurry to be somewhere else... Honestly, Father, can't we talk about this in our cabin? Please? People are looking at us."

  Father's gaze shifted to the other passengers, and for an instant his expression changed. The calm, dignified man was gone, replaced by some wary, hunted creature that had been backed into a corner. The next second the spell broke. Chuckling, he held out his hand. "My dear, what would I do without you?"

  Go completely off your rockers?

  I didn't say anything, though, and took his hand, simply glad that he was leading me toward the main hatch and away from prying eyes.

  ~~~

  Four hours later, I sat on my berth, trying to stave off seasickness by holding very still while drinking chamomile tea. This was proving more difficult than I was used to. Father had purchased 2nd class tickets, C level, in the lower deck of the fore passenger's section, so there was quite a bit of pitch and roll to contend with.

  The trick seemed to be to hold the teacup still and wait for the tea to slosh toward my face, and then open my mouth, rather than attempt to keep the tea tilted toward my lips by adjusting the angle of the teacup. It was too easy to overcorrect. Suffice to say, there was more tea on me than anywhere else.

  The cabin door slid open and Father stepped in, quickly closing the door after him.

  I glanced up at the sound of the latch pin.

  He had been gone for nearly an hour, but he didn't have the ginger biscuits he had left to get. In fact, all he had was that tight, tense, hunted look on his face. He put his hands on his hips and released a long, slow breath, then moved to sit on the edge of his berth, reaching to pluck the Porte De Darre advertisement bulletin from where he had left it on his pillow.

  I put my teacup on its saucer. "They didn't have any biscuits?"

  He lifted his head and gave me a vacant stare through his spectacles. "Oh. No. Sorry, my dear. No biscuits," he said, then went back to perusing the 'searching for' ads.

  I didn't really care about the biscuits. It was the way he wouldn't quite meet my eyes that made me uneasy. It seemed very much like he was hiding something.

  He had never hidden things from me before we left Garding. For the thousandth time since the fire, I wondered if I had lost him too that night. There was a widening distance between us that I couldn't seem to find a way across, no matter what I did or said. He could barely let me cross the street alone, anymore, when he used to trust me with everything. I desperately wanted to
believe he was simply overwhelmed with losing the business, but his paranoia only seemed to be getting worse. I swallowed hard. What would happen to us in the Colonies if he really was losing his mind?

  3. An Awful Adventure

  6th of Uirra

  After three days of feeling absolutely wretched, I finally woke without ridding my stomach of last night's dinner. Quite the opposite. I was famished, so I decided to go up to the mess deck even though Father had forgotten to leave me a key. Happily, he had left a set of meal tickets in his bag.

  That missing key should have been my first clue that something was about to go wrong. Father never forgot anything. Or he never used to. At the time, though, I simply added that to the growing list of ways my father had begun to scrape away at my sanity, took a meal ticket, and left anyway, telling myself he would forgive me for ignoring his orders to stay in the cabin.

  The gargantuan Starre & Sons transit ships were marvels of engineering; according to the brochure, the Galvania was one of their largest, with four decks, a thousand berths, two massive compression engines, and two full-size saloons. The brochure also made the dubious claim that sailing with Starre & Sons was "The best value for your hard-earned money! Travel farther, spend less!"

  That may have been technically true, but while there was great size meant to accommodate great quantity, thus making it possible to travel cheaply, the quality was inversely related. Thin walls, inadequate heating, leaky valves, coarse linens. Everything was made to carry swarms of people across the ocean in all the ambiance and comfort of a sardine can.

  The 2nd class saloon reminded me of the cafeteria at school, with its long trestle tables and benches set in rigid, impersonal lines. At school, though, the walls were white, not dingy grey green. There wasn't as much welded metal, either.

  A man took my meal ticket at the door to the dining room, fed the ticket into a recording machine, and then opened the stile, allowing me to go down the line to the serving station, where a member of the kitchen staff ladled my rations onto a tin plate and shoved it across the counter.

  It would seem Starre and his sons had bought their dining service secondhand from a prison. Possibly their food, too, from the overcooked smell of things. I stared down at my plate and seriously debated whether or not it was possible to kill a chicken twice.

  Imagining the cooks performing resurrections on poultry in the galley, I found an empty stretch of bench and sat. Then I examined my 'lunch' while thinking of Mrs. Winterborne's plum puffs and coriander muffins. And that cream cake she made for my twenty-third birthday, with the dusting of iridescent pink sugar on the peppermint glaze.

  It didn't help. The biscuit-brick nearly broke my teeth, and the mummified drumsticks actively refused to be swallowed. Then I almost coughed it all back up when the gravy slid down my throat in a single gelatinous lump.

  A florid woman with thick shoulders and a large nose was eyeing me from the other side of the table, her gaze openly amused. At my attempt not to gag, she leaned forward. "I'll take yer vittles, Missy, if ya haven't the stomach."

  With a shuddering breath, I pushed what was left across to her and got to my feet. "Thank you," I whispered from behind my hand, covering a queasy burp as she began forking everything into her mouth in big, stomping bites, quivering gravy and all.

  Having 'eaten,' I decided to do some exploring, thinking Father might be taking the air. I wandered along the main deck promenade by myself, surveying an endless slate sea and an overcast winter sky, then turned around in the peak of the prow to take in the sheer size of the Galvania's four smoke stacks marching like soldiers down the centerline of the ship.

  After watching the deck for another half an hour, though, I hadn't spotted Father anywhere, and the wind was picking up. With a last, worried look around, I went back inside.

  Growing up, it was a well-known fact among my friends that I could get lost in a bucket. I learned to cope by making note of large landmarks, or by finding a clearly drawn map of my surroundings that referenced said landmarks. In a pinch, following a friend or kind stranger who seemed to know where they were going would get me to where I needed to be. Unfortunately for me and my missing sense of direction, the Galvania's lower decks were laid out like a waffle iron, with an extraordinary number of nondescript hallways that were all the same. No large landmarks were available, and not very many friends or kind strangers, either.

  At last, I rounded another dingy green corner into another dingy green hallway with white doors on either side and came upon a deck steward.

  "Sir!" I called, smiling politely. "Could you help me find my cabin? I'm afraid I can't remember where it is, and everything seems so similar —”

  The deck steward gave me a patronizing smile. "Your number is on your key, Miss."

  "I know," I said, "I was getting to that. My father forgot to give me a key."

  The deck steward stared at me for a beat too long, his brain skipping a few cogs. Once he had re-meshed his gears, he straightened. "Right. Well, you'll have to speak to the Chief Mate, Miss." With that, he went marching off down the hallway I had found him in.

  "Thank you." I hurried to keep up with him, assuming he was going to lead me to the Chief Mate.

  He didn't speak again the whole way up to the pilot deck, where he showed me to an arched hatchway door marked, "Office of the Chief Mate." Then he wheeled around and left me to fend for myself.

  Feeling quite a bit like an errant schoolgirl, I tapped at the porthole.

  Less than five minutes later, I found out I was not listed as a passenger on the Galvania, and my father was sharing an eight-person 3rd class men's cabin with seven other people.

  I observed dumbly as the Chief Mate showed me, first, that my name was not on the ship's passenger manifest anywhere, and second – right there in my father's handwriting – that Arrix Warring had come aboard alone, and checked into a cabin I knew we weren't staying in.

  "Are you quite alright, Miss?" the Chief Mate asked, giving me a concerned glance as I reached out to grab at the edge of his desk.

  "Ah... yes. I'm fine," I mumbled. "Thank you." Then I took a step toward the door.

  "Miss, I'm afraid you'll have to stay here until I find out what's going on," the Chief Mate said, not unkindly. "Stealing a passage is a crime."

  After everything I had been through in the past weeks, that was the last straw. Father wasn't just forgetting things, or planning things poorly, or being annoyingly protective or vague, this was far, far... far worse. This was bizarre, and probably illegal on several counts. He would have had to have bought two different tickets with false identity papers. Or bribed several people. For what?

  I wasn't even able to muster anger. I was too tired of the chaos to care.

  The Chief Mate rang for a runner, casting sidelong squints in my direction as he wrote out a message for someone. He caught my eye and aimed a finger at a small chair that folded out from the wall. Then he went back to whatever he had been doing before I interrupted him.

  Apparently, I was supposed to sit.

  Numb, I unfolded the seat, sat down, clasped my hands neatly in my lap, and contemplated how much my life had changed. Barely a month ago I was in our front parlor, taking tea in my mother's finest set, laughing with Betha as we discussed upcoming galas and our more ridiculous marriage prospects.

  Two days after that, I was fishing the charred pieces of my mother's tea service out of what was left of the cook's cupboard. The last time I stood in our front parlor, it had been nothing but four walls of blackened masonry rising from a sea of frozen, trampled mud. Three weeks later and there I was, facing charges of stowing away.

  I barely acknowledged my father when he came in. It was petty of me. Childish, even, but for the first time in my life I resented him. I wanted my normal, predictable father back, and instead he was drifting farther and farther away, so I kept my head down and my eyes on the floor while he proceeded to invent the biggest, most astonishing lie I had ever heard. We were of
absolutely no relation whatsoever, the poor, confused girl, but he had seen me coming and going from room 406 and believed my last name to be Larkham.

  He said all of this in a hushed tone, as if he were trying not to be rude. Then he gave me a very kind, very concerned nod, murmured a sincere, "It'll be alright, Miss Larkham. I wish you all the best," and walked out.

  4. Reason

  6th of Uirra, Continued

  I stared at the inside of the hatch door, half expecting Father to come popping back in to say this was all a great prank, and that I should see the look on my face.

  But he didn't, and the Chief Mate cleared his throat.

  I did it. I pretended I was this Miss Larkham and made a tearful confession of taking a silly dare too far. I apologized for all the trouble I had caused, then meekly followed the Chief Mate down to cabin 406.

  A woman I had never met before in my life opened the door at the Chief Mate's knock and, to my amazement, exclaimed, "There you are!"

  Then she thanked the Chief Mate for bringing me back and promised to punish me appropriately, all while pulling me inside and shutting the door in his face.

  She listened at the panel, a droll grin tugging at her brightly painted lips.

  "What is going —" I started to ask, when there was another knock at the door, and the woman calmly unlatched it.

  Father handed her a small fold of bills. "Thank you ever so much."

  I gaped at them both in disbelief.

  She shrugged and gave him a lazy she-cat sort of smile as she tucked the money into her bodice. She stayed there, lurking in her doorway as Father pulled me swiftly out into the hall and down to our own cabin. Or the cabin I thought was ours. Maybe it wasn't.

  With nothing else to do, I sat down on the edge of my bed. For several seconds, silence reigned. Finally, when it became clear that he wasn't going to be the one to say anything, I couldn't stand it anymore. "What is going on?"