Alice leans back against the cold stone of the wall with her eyes closed, breathing deeply until she catches her breath. It takes longer than she’d care to admit, but when she hears the unmistakable sound of someone running all the way down the alley, far away from Alice’s hiding spot, a broad grins spreads over her face. It’s a moment later that she finally opens her eyes.
Only to find a middle-aged man staring intently at her. He hasn’t said anything yet, so she doubts he’ll call for the guards, so she takes the time to brush off her palms before addressing him.
“Professor Hedgewick?” she asks.
The man stares at her. Alice rummages in her pocket for the well-worn picture, the only scrap of information that she’s had to lead her to her father over four long years of traveling, and inspects it. There are five men in students’ robes, and one more beside them in a professor’s robe. The students look close to Alice’s age now, but the pictured professor looks even older than the man now in front of her.
“Yes?” the man asks.
She sighs and tucks the photograph back in her pocket. So her information was bad — but not so bad the person she’s found doesn’t know who she’s really looking for. This could either be good, or very, very bad.
“I’m not sure that you can help me with this, but I was wondering if I could ask a favor.”
“You want a favor from me? How about not calling the guards for long enough that you get to explain yourself? Or do you want a favor in addition to that one?”
Alice ignores it. Whoever this is, they’re not overtly working for the Company, because otherwise there’d be guards in place to arrest her the moment she entered the yard. Which means they’re working just for Piers. Or perhaps worse, they’re looking for her father, too — ‘cause then they’d be looking, and ahead of her.
“The favor I’d like to ask is for you to help me find my father,” she says.
“And what makes you think I could do that?” the imitation professor asks.
“You taught him. And my mother. It was a while ago… just over twenty years, as a matter of fact.”
Suddenly, the man’s posture radically changes. He glances furtively around them, as if it’s now he who’s afraid they’re being watched, and not Alice who’s afraid of merely being followed by the people she stole from. When he speaks, his tone has changed entirely — he’s no longer attempting to act wise beyond his apparent years. “Come with me,” he says urgently. “Inside, now.”
Alice’s hand goes to her pistol but she does as she’s bid. She figures, what’s the harm in going into a large, open, empty room that’s full of big windows that everyone can see into—
There’s a metallic clicking sound behind her and she turns slowly. The imitation professor has a gun in the folds of his robes and it’s pointed at Alice’s stomach.
“Who are you and what do you want with my uncle?” he demands.
“Can we maybe — not, with the gun?”
The man steps forward. “Who are you—”
“—and what do I want with your uncle, yes I know, I heard you the first time. What I’m saying is, you’ve made your point, I would really appreciate it if you could put the gun away now.”
He doesn’t. Instead, he just stares at her. When he finally opens his mouth, he’s barely gotten a word out before she interrupts. “Who—”
“Yes, yes, I’ve got it, who are you, what is your plan and all that. On the one hand — what makes you think I’d tell you, even if you do have a gun on me? I mean, kill me and I’m dead, sure, but what about the people who sent me? I have one of them backing me up right now, as a matter of fact.”
“You were trying to escape from someone you robbed who was chasing you.”
“Was not,” Alice says.
The decoy raises his eyebrows. “No? Was it not your pursuer who I heard shouting ‘stop, thief!’? Because I could have sworn—”
“You can have it!” Alice says quickly. She rummages in her pockets for the purse and jangles it enticingly. “Everything that’s in here could be yours.”
“And what makes you think I’d want stolen gold?”
“This gold isn’t stolen,” she says. “It’s mine — I had used it to barter passage somewhere I didn’t really want to go so we’d end up here.”
“And I suppose you got a refund from your backup out there since you’re not making it to that final destination.”
“So I may have taken the refund, if we want to be strictly precise. But a refund’s still a refund, and this ain’t Tuanaki.”
She gets a strange look for this comment. “Why would you want to go to Tuanaki?” he asks.
“It was the only place I could think of that would require a stop here,” she says. “I wasn’t really looking forward to the prospect of going to Tuanaki for real, if the captain I hired turned out to be crazier than I expected, but we’ve got what we’ve got and for now I think it’ll be time for me to discuss the terms of my giving you this money, hmm?”
“What terms?” the decoy asks suspiciously.
“Well, I’m not going to give you any gold for no reason. I’ll be paying — for information, that is. That way, even if that backup finds her way here, she won’t be able to deny your claim to the gold. It weren’t hers to begin with and you got it proper-like.”
Alice watches the corners of the decoy’s eyes as she slips into the dockside drawl that was her second language. Skin folds into crows feet as he fails to bite back a grin. She is much better at hiding her glee that he’s fallen for her trap. “What is it you want to know?” he asks.
“Your — uncle. The real Professor. How do I find him?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“You’re not going to start with that again, are you?”
“Only as long as you don’t answer,” he says. Alice sighs.
“Fine,” she says. “I was being truthful, you know. I’m looking for my father.”
“Uncle Benji hasn’t taught anyone in decades,” the decoy says. “What makes you think he’ll remember your parents?”
Alice sighs. This is one of the things she’s been afraid of, and truth to be told, she hasn’t come up with an answer that she herself is willing to accept, so she’s not exactly sure what she’s going to say now. But she can’t exactly say nothing, either. “I don’t know that he will,” she admits. “But he’s the last chance I’ve got.”
“And what if he can’t help you?”
“Well, I won’t know that until I see him, will I? If you’re not gonna help, well, I s’ppose I’ll have to track him down myself. But surely you wouldn’t mind a nice big sack of gold? And all you’ve got to do is tell me something that I promise to keep a secret from everyone else.”
“And what’s to stop me from shooting you, right now?”
“There’s nothing stopping you from doing that, of course,” Alice says, a grin slowly forming on her face. “But then, I haven’t told you who I am yet, have I? And, you know, I don’t suppose I will, until you tell me where the real Professor is.”
“Who’s to say that I know where he is?”
“Oh, please,” Alice says. “You’re in the least accessible telegram hub of all time. Why would you even be here, if the Professor didn’t need someone to get his message to a broader-reaching audience than his local network? And in the meantime you’ve got a chance to become one of the great information masters of this century, so why wouldn’t you leap at the chance? No, of course, I understand precisely what drove you to this place. I’m just hoping that maybe we can put aside our differences and—”
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
With loud, metallic thud, a shovel makes contact with the back of the decoy’s head and he crumples to the floor. Alice has her pistol up and aimed at the attacker before the decoy’s hit the ground, but it takes a second for her to recognize the figure on wielding the gardening tool.
“Gunny?” Alice asks. “What—?”
“I’ve been listening since this piece of trash told you to go inside,” she says. “I didn’t actually — keep going.”
Alice looks down at the man collapsed on the floor. Then she looks back at Gunny — then at the man on the floor again. “Well, thanks for knocking out my only source of information,” she says.
“Actually, I’m not so sure about that,” Gunny says. “This Professor Hedgewick you’re looking for — the real one, not him what’s lying there — I think I might know someone who could help you find him.”
“And who’s that?” Alice asks, though she has a sneaking suspicion of the answer.
“Mal.”
She begins to regret stealing his purse, after all.
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Mal paces back and forth in the cloth maker’s shop, wearing a hole in the fine rug trapped beneath the heels of his boots. “You want to get in contact with who?” he asks.
“Professor Hedgewick,” Alice repeats. “Gunny said she’d heard you mention the name a couple times, and — she’d knocked out the only other lead I had, so…”
Mal sighs. This day is not going according to plan, and even the way it’s going off the rails doesn’t make any sense. “Did you bring back my purse?”
Alice blushes. “Uh, yeah, here,” she says, sheepishly handing it over. Mal pockets it — and carefully closes his coat, vowing to be more mindful of his possessions in the future. “I don’t have any more to give you than what I gave for getting us to Tuanaki. But at least we don’t have to go out there, right? So there’s a bit of a silver lining, I guess.”
“And why are you looking for the Professor?”
“I told you, I’m looking for my father.”
“Oh, so that part of the story was true?”
“I’m just trying to keep a few people off my trail,” she mutters under her breath. “In fact, I wanted to have this little chat on the ship, but—”
“Merchant! Double the oilskins in that order of ours!” Mal shouts out. Gunny tilts her head in a questioning gesture for Mal, and he grins widely. “Best check your oilskins now, ladies. We’re going to Laka’al, and it’s the rainy season.”
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With the cloth-maker’s hired help and the three of them carrying boxes, they make the transfer of goods in a single trip. It’s not a particularly fun trip, and it would never be doable if the merchant hadn’t loaded a mechanical cart that could carry far more than any one person with the vast majority of what they’d ordered. Then it’s simply a matter of unpacking crates into an orderly configuration in the cargo hold. The question of whether to volunteer to help doesn’t even cross Alice’s mind until she and Mal have returned, at Mal’s insistence, to the cabin. Only then does she remember that she is not, as she had always imagined, living and working on an airship, but as a matter of fact paying for the gift of its passage along the island chain. It’s as much a sobering dose of reality as Mal’s question: “Why are you looking for the Professor?”
“I’m really looking for my father,” Alice admits. Mal has settled in the chair at his desk. Alice, without much choice in where else to sit, settles on the open bunk. “I left home four years ago. I won’t say why — it’s not important, really. Suffice to say I wanted out of there, and the only other person anywhere in the world that I knew existed and might care about me was my father. I’d never met him, but I thought, maybe…
“So for the last four years I’ve done everything I can — pulled every string I have and cashed in on favors and asked for favors and everything else I could think of until I had narrowed down the fates of six people. See, I have this photograph…” Reaching into her pocket, Alice pulls out the sepia scrap that has been the closest thing to a map she’s used these last four years.
“When it was whole, this was a photograph of the Lonely Palms Island Art Institute class that contains both of my parents, and the class sponsor. The half of the photograph I saved didn’t have my parents in it, but it did have these six people — and maybe one of them could lead me to my father. So far, I’ve tracked down all the students in it. None of them remembered my parents — none of the ones who were alive, anyway. As for whether the dead ones could’ve, who knows? But the last person I have to ask — the one person who other people were able to reliably identify — was this Professor Benjamin Hedgewick, their sponsor. I don’t know if there’s any good reason that either of my parents would have stood out enough for him to remember, but I just need to go to him, on the off chance that he remembers one of them, that maybe he could help…”
Mal looks at Alice critically. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“What choice do I have? It’s not like I have any skills…”
“That would just depend on how you define skill,” Mal says. “They might not be the most… above-board practices, but you’re handy with some of the trickier parts of making ends meet. I don’t know that most of my clients have use for someone with sticky fingers, but I’m sure there are plenty of folk who would love the use of some fingers like that. And you’re never gonna convincingly tell me that you couldn’t make ends meet the old — I mean, you could always, err, steal.”
Mal seems so awkward about suggesting it that Alice wonders how he’s never been that desperate. It’s been a long time since she’s been truly hungry, but it’s not something she’s forgetting any time soon. In the meantime all she can say is that all of her gold is, once again, back in Mal’s pocket, and she didn’t even have the chance to buy herself a meal before getting back on the ship. So she’ll just have to swindle one out of—
“Who does the cooking around here?” she asks. Mal looks at her strangely, his expression far more eloquent than words could ever be. “On the ship, I mean. If I wanted to see someone about a hot meal…”
“Oh, uh, Den’s in charge of the meals.”
“Den?”
“You knew me and Gunny when you walked on board, but not Den?”
“No, I never heard that name,” she says. She doesn’t add how suspicious she is that she didn’t hear the name, because she’s not sure that Mal would like the idea of how much she’d gotten him checked out once she agreed to have Benny charter his ship. But then, sometimes you can’t take chances — and it seems clear that it’s paid off this time. “Who’s Den?”
“He’s the mechanic,” Mal says. “Haven’t you seen a — well, a dwarf? I’m sure he’s been around.” However, once he takes a moment to think about it, Mal realizes that he hasn’t seen Den around much in the last day. Most of that isn’t terribly unusual — Den keeps to himself, and his duties are in the boiler room, which conveniently doubles as a kitchen. He’s probably got something warm enough to eat but perhaps not. “You know where the kitchen is, though, right? Center of the ship by the steam engine. Bit hard to miss.”
“And how much would a meal be?”
Mal gives her a strange look. “You mean, how long would it take to make? I’m sure Den has something heated up already, it might not be the best stew but at least it’s something. Dwarves are particularly fond of mushrooms, as it turns out.”
“No, no, I mean — how much would it cost?”
Mal stares at her even more blankly than before. “How much would it… cost?”
“Yes,” Alice says, nodding. “I mean, you seem a reasonable sort, like you ain’t about to charge me an arm and a leg, but after paying you, I’m skint broke.”
Mal is still staring at her blankly. “But why would I charge you for a meal?”
Alice stares at him blankly. And then, slowly, she grins. “Wow, you really have never taken on passengers, have you?” she asks. “Everyone charges for meals. But if you’re really not going to charge me…”
“When was the last time you ate?” he asks.
“Uhh…”
Her stomach chooses the worst — or perhaps the best — moment to growl. Truth is she hadn’t had anything to eat the day she got on the Nameless, but that was nothing new. It’s only now that she’s really starting to get the light-headedness that leads to desperate measures for finding new food, so there’s still some hope. But suddenly she’s not sure if she wants Mal to know just how long it’s been since she’s eaten. Not because she thinks he cares, or anything like that — she’s just worried that he’ll think she’s still a stupid kid who can’t take of herself.
Yeah, because that would be so much worse than him actually caring, she thinks. She’s mad at herself when she answers. “A day and a half,” she says. “At least — that was how long ago I got on this ship, wasn’t it? Ate right before then, but…”
“But you figured you’d be able to steal a better meal while you were on the run today?”
Alice blushes a little — but she doesn’t look sheepish about it. “Actually I was banking on getting some of your purse to buy a meal. I wasn’t exaggerating about being skint, hard as that may be to believe.”
“Oh, no, I can believe that,” Mal says. His tone has something strange in it she can’t identify — like he’s pitying her, almost, but that’s not the expression she’s seeing on his face. It’s more like — regret, or some kind of memory. “Regardless, meals on my ship are free. To both crew and passengers.”
Alice slowly smiles. “You run a might fine establishment here, sir."
“Just — give me some space for a bit. I’ve got to telegram some people…”
“The Professor?”
“And others,” Mal says, nodding. “I have to say, it’s a fine bit of luck that you just happened to be on my ship when it turned out you needed my contact.”
Alice doesn’t say anything on the matter, and looks like she won’t for a long, long time. So Mal just sighs. “Go eat, then.” Alice turns to go, and it’s only when she’s gotten to the cabin doorway that he calls out again. “Oh and Alice? Do try not to eat so fast you puke, alright?”
Alice grins. “Haven’t done that since my first year on the streets,” she says with a grin. “Don’t worry. I’ll only eat fast enough to regret it in an hour or so.”
Mal shakes his head disparagingly but she’s already out the door again, long out of range of any comments he might want to make. And truth to be told, he’s not sure he should be making any more comments. He’s already running dangerously close to the territory of more flirting, and even now he could feel Gunny’s distant glares. It didn’t help that she had now asked him to put her in contact with the Professor. Which couldn’t possibly end the way she wanted it, and especially not if she wanted to get any information out of him.
Well, Alice, let’s see how you handle being disappointed.