Chapter 1

What the penny novels don’t tell you about the scene of a murder is that you can taste the blood in the air, its coppery scent covers everything and the heavy taste caresses your tongue.

It didn’t matter that I had read dozens, if not hundreds, of those seedy stories in between my runs. Nothing could have prepared me for the sight before my eyes. Nothing could have prepared me to see my father laying at my feet in a pool of his own blood, his body battered and broken, my name, Tobias, written in that same blood, by his own finger before he died.

I screamed. I screamed but I couldn’t find my voice. Nothing came out. Just a silent wail of horror at the sight of my father, my only living family, lying dead in front of me. I screamed that silent scream for I don’t know how long.

I was only broken free of my trance of grief by rough hands pulling me away from my father’s body. I don’t know when I had crawled to him, but I had, and his blood-stained my clothes. It was everywhere. My hands and clothes were bathed in it.

It took the sound of shackles being pulled from their leather sheathes to snap me back to the now.

What was happening?

I looked towards the origin of that metallic sound. My eyes were first greeted by the maroon canvas of a Sky Marshall’s suit. It looked like the blood that had poured from my father’s body, reminding me of the fresh void inside that felt as if the weight of the whole earth itself was pushing down on my heart.

“Tobias Weatherspoon, you’re under arrest for the murder of your father, Francis Jack Weatherspoon.”

*****

Time slowed as he said those words.

What?

What had he said?

He yanked my right arm behind my back, twisting it cruelly, nearly tweaking it out of socket as he did so, and before I could think, the geared manacle clicked shut on my wrist.

“No, that’s not right!” I thought, trying to keep from panicking. “That can’t be right!”

It hit me then. It really hit me, what the Marshall had said.

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I was being arrested. I was being arrested for the murder of my father. They thought that I had killed my own father.

How could they think that?

The officer’s grip lightened as he tried to maneuver me to grab my free hand that was hanging limp in disbelief.

I don’t know what impetus moved me, but I found myself twisting my manacled hand from the man’s grip.

He drove forward grasping at my empty hand. I danced away from his grip. “No! I didn’t do this!” I shouted at him.

The Marshall reaching for his steam pistol was all the answer he gave in return.

I moved without thinking. If I was good at one thing, it was moving. I was a currier. Deftness of feet, speed, and balance were essential. I had seen at least two other curriers fall to their deaths when we were caught in an uncharted eddy.

I used that speed and rushed towards the officer, startling him and giving me the half-second I needed to swing the other end of the manacle attached to my right hand at the burly Sky Marshall’s sideburned face.

The heavy iron shackle took the man in the temple and knocked him off balance.

I rushed past him, and past the broken body of my father through his clattered workshop. My father made our living as a tinkerer and repairman. Or had made his living so, I should say, one can’t really make a living when they were dead.

I ducked instinctually as the loud puff of compressed steam sent an iron bullet hurtling toward me.

It flew over my head and it buried itself somewhere else in the workshop with a loud cracking of wood.

Another bullet from the eight-shot steam pistol rang out.

This one was much closer, and the wood from a pallet just to my left shattered, and a splinter from the crack flew at me, tearing a gash in my cheek.

I barreled forward dodging pallets and piles of gears and the heaps of scrap metal that littered my father’s shop like a ramshackle city in the modest garage.

I looked to my left. Twenty paces away was a window. We weren’t on the edge of the city and my father’s shop was on a well-platformed part of New Welling. There was no danger of falling to my death if I took a leap from that window. I had done so many times when I was younger and needed to escape the oppressive friendliness of my father whose ready smile would kill the dark mood that my days of puberty had told me was a necessary part of growing up.

A shot rang out in the direction of the window.

The Marshall had guessed what I was planning on doing.

I took a leaping step away from the window and drove towards the right, drawing another shot from the steam pistol.

I shifted my weight again, twisted slightly, and, with the grace of a cat, bounded towards the window.

The heavy crashing of feet and another two shots followed me.

I slammed through the window and the glass shattered as I plowed through it.

I landed in a shower of glass on one of the wooden and metal walkways that held the zeppelin city of New Welling together like bandages held wounded soldiers together after raids from small pirate nations.

Shards of that same glass dug into my palms as I pushed myself back to my feet and started hurtling down the small alleyway that I had run through a million times before.

I heard the Sky Marshall shouting behind me and the clicking of his gun. He must have run out of bullets.

That didn’t stop me.

I kept running.

I ran until I couldn’t anymore.

Then I vomited.