Chapter Four

Rusted Beginnings

Four days before he would have to explain his presence to a self-appointed jury of very skeptical strangers, Elias imagined himself standing on a lake of melting ice. The dry months of late summer had cracked the clay-laden soil around Acreton, splitting the dusty dirt into shattered islands that threatened to flip and swallow any wrong step, though cool thoughts did little for his warm body.

When outsiders described Sapphire’s Reach, the first detail they would inevitably remark upon was the red clay it was best known for. Red found its way into every crack and crevice of every building and carriage in Acreton, gifting the young town an appearance reminiscent of rusted refuse. Of course, people lived in the rusted settlement, and many had never known any other.

Elias had only ever known the same town and its same people.

He was spending his one day off with them, shooting scrap metal targets hung from the branches of a leafless tree. Melo took his shot and missed, cursing at himself as he handed the weapon to Elias.

Elias poured more black powder into the muzzle, inserted his bullet, and shoved it down firmly with a wooden ramrod. After priming the flash pan, he balanced the hefty flintlock pistol in his right hand, pulled back the hammer with his left, then took a long breath and a quick shot. His iron target rang like a bell and spun on its string like the coins Elias so often flicked into a twirl.

“That’s three for Elias,” said Ginger, receiving her gun from him. Elias and Melo stepped back as she stretched into position, cracking her neck as she reloaded the pistol. A cloud of smoke erupted as Ginger took her last shot.

“God damn it.”

“That’s two for Ginger,” Elias said.

“Fuck off.” She sighed. “It’s this bloody pistol. The barrel’s too short.” Ginger waved it around as if she might discard the weapon like a piece of trash. “I’m trying to get my hands on a new Leefield. Much more precise. Father says he’ll buy it if I can find one for sale, but good luck in this shithole.”

Ginger had resources Elias and Melo seldom took for granted—namely, her father owned a successful trading company. Rich was a relative term here, but Ginger could afford the new toys and trinkets that often caught her eye, and that made her local royalty as much as anyone Elias knew. Not that a whole lot passed through Acreton.

Except when an airship from Sailor’s Rise descended into town.

Acreton had no sky port, and so the merchant ship had landed much like a sea ship in the wide Crimson River that bordered the long edge of their settlement. Elias was meandering home from their weekly round of competitive target practice when he saw the vessel pulling into the docks. If not for its colossal hydrogen balloon, it could have been any other large ship—perhaps not unlike the one he imagined took his father from him.

Elias snaked his away around gathering onlookers, stopping to read the name painted intricately along the ship’s wooden bow. The Sleeping Sparrow, it read.

* * *

To understand this moment in our story—that is, to understand the mix of competing emotions swirling inside Elias’s unsettled stomach as he first sees the airship he has so eagerly awaited—one must better understand our protagonist. One must start at the beginning.

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Whenever Elias thought of family, he thought only of his mother. She had built them their foundation when all seemed doomed to crumble, and she had taught him the value of perseverance. So much so that, even when the gray fever took her two years earlier, a fifteen-year-old Elias stayed standing, so solidly were the values of survival instilled in him.

Elias held no negative views of his father so much as he held no views at all. His father had lost his life at sea when Elias was still too young to recall most things. What he did remember were the years that followed. How his mother labored endlessly from job to job, insisting that her son attend school and learn to read and write. An education was the clay that molded the modern man, she told him when he protested, while Elias countered that he ought to earn his keep. With a bittersweet chuckle, she had reminded her son that he would fund her lavish lifestyle as an old spinster.

It was a debt he would never repay.

Still, Elias was always trying. Despite possessing an aptitude for the subject matter, the orphaned teenager dropped out of school a year early, telling himself he had learned what he needed to learn and that he didn’t have a choice, besides. His education had been built upon her foundation. Now he would need to cobble together his own.

Elias followed in her footsteps, taking odd jobs and working undesirable hours. He had no leverage when it came to pay, though he was compensated fairly delivering fabrics and garments for a tailor who’d always been fond of his mother, more so than she had been fond of him. The fact that Mr. Humbledon’s generosity persisted even after she was gone made Elias reconsider the man in a more positive light. Still, it was all only ever enough to scrape by. Scraping by wasn’t what she had wanted for him, nor was it what Elias wanted for himself.

He first heard about Sailor’s Rise as a child, though the name popped up frequently as Elias acquired work with various merchants. It was clear that many shipments passed through the politically neutral city-state, that it was a hub for commerce, a metropolis for the modern man. This was in large part owing to the city’s location. Sailor’s Rise was the intersection between kingdoms and republics, sitting atop the mountainous center of the known world. Sapphire’s Reach, by comparison, was nearer to the edge of it.

After months of mundane work, Elias decided he was done with scraping by, but the best that Acreton had to offer was a tailor’s kindness. He had ambition and, thanks to his mother, most of an education. Acreton would never offer anything more because Acreton was smaller than Elias.

But Sailor’s Rise was bigger than them both.

In the hours he struggled to sleep, Elias often drew illustrations of the city in a notebook he kept tucked under his pillow, his mental montage made up of details he overheard or snipped from day-old newspapers. He sketched scenes on busy streets he imagined himself strolling through, a red-brick estate he dreamed of one day owning, overlooking the checkered hills and valleys of a sprawling cityscape. It was a childish hobby, those drawings, but one’s imagination was the only reprieve when reality’s offerings were so meager, and he’d always had a wild one.

Elias hoped he would one day find out just how accurate his illustrations were. Had he captured the city and its essence, or had he constructed something else? His imagined city had become a place of its own, existing in Elias if nowhere else.

While Acreton received its more practical shipments by sea, the occasional merchant airship would bring fine goods from Sailor’s Rise—everything from aged wines to luxurious silks to exotic spices. Elias had always enjoyed these glimpses of civilization, imported at a premium to his backwater town, even if he couldn’t afford any of it.

But when he heard the news, a few months after his seventeenth birthday, that another airship was destined for Acreton, Elias allowed himself to wonder if his dream might at last become a reality.

* * *

And so, in the pit of his roiling stomach as The Sleeping Sparrow first floated into his field of vision, excitement mixed with anxiety as Elias questioned whether buying his way on board would even be possible, given his current balance and the very limited time he had to acquire the rest of the money required. He suspected it wouldn’t be.

Elias had so far saved a total of thirty relics, and even that had taken time and effort. The consensus from the traders he’d pestered with queries was that passage to Sailor’s Rise would set a man back at least fifty, assuming he could negotiate.

There was no doubt that this was the ship he had been waiting for, that this was his ticket to Sailor’s Rise, but a pricey ticket it was—especially for a man of limited means. According to his intel, The Sleeping Sparrow would only be docked in Acreton for forty-eight hours, barely enough time to scrape together a few relics, let alone the twenty more he needed.

Elias’s mind ran laps as he paced the docks, trying to concoct some clever scheme to make the impossible possible. He worried that this particular dream might just be too big, even for a dreamer like him.

And yet, Elias couldn’t stop entertaining the idea. His passage to Sailor’s Rise: it was so close, if only he could reach forward and open the way.