Evidence Elara Haricot takes in the hundreds of shipspinner cadets and seizes her legs to keep them from buckling.

The Twin Pales blaze onto the stadium, where the cadets rise to give their standing ovations. The clap thunders as loud as a barrage of gondola broadsides, one after the other. Evi, unable to contain herself, cheers and takes her friends, her colleagues, her devoted and reliable, and those who had studied her and pushed her until the very moment she was here and wrapping, throwing her arms around them and saying, “We made it! Hells, did we ever make it!”

Bralence takes Evidence’s left side, and Finola her right. Both inherit the Imelda name and are siblings, in a sense, though Evidence’s age falls a few years under Bralence’s, but only a year behind Finola’s. Finola’s age, in particular, matches those of the others in their shipspinner program of twenty-five souls, all of them sharing the same gestures of friendship, drinking in the relief of years of brutal scholarship vanished at the clap of thousands of hands.

The convocation’s speaker is a balding woman who bows and yields to a man whose name each student has known for decades but has never met.

“Cadets of Locke Samoray’s Shipspinning Academy, how delightful I am to see the brightest lot to soon enter the Yards,” says the Shipspinning Elder. He’s balding, tanned skin, and pompous. Yet he is why Evidence is here, so she has no choice but to listen.

“Same shit every year,” whispers Bralence.

“Yeah,” Finola adds, “but we’re the victims this time.”

The two clap a high-five behind Evi’s back, snickering like brothers and sisters of old, though Bralence and Finola had never met until attending Locke Samoray’s Shipspinning Academy.

Evidence did not have the pleasure of meeting her birth siblings either, and at the thought, she contemplates how many more of them are out there, roaming around. Are they men? Women? Boys or girls? How many? What are their professions? Are they even in Bijigress anymore? Are they dead? Or, more specifically, did the maligned kill them?

The thought of those disgusting creatures makes Evi shutter, an instinct rooting back to a lecture with a particular medical zoology professor in the city of her birth. That Evi and the two souls beside her made it out of that place before the city burned seems like a brushstroke from the artisan, which is fate.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Evidence loses herself in the heads of the thousand shipspinner cadets. As she blinks, she notices them standing, and Bralence’s insisting tug on her arm to follow.

“We made it,” Evi mutters, still unable to comprehend how close she had come to becoming an incubator. Only two more years after that lecture with Muttens, the cat, and Evi would have been chained to a vat. That Bijigress had whisked her away at the right time still weakens her.

Percival Traigus, Bijigress’s Shipspinner Elder, slides his speech into the mundane, the predictable congratulations, the wishes to be well off, and to never dispel that work ethic so magically imprinted on them at Locke Samoray’s. ‘Magic,’ Evi thinks, is a word that should only be prescribed to the Writings, the definitions of the world’s physical laws manifesting in the Salvarin language or, if it is to be believed, all written languages of anyone perceiving them. Any other usage of the word is hyperbole, but she’s a little bit of hyperbole herself, isn’t she?

Traigus calls the graduating cadets to stand and the students follow. Bowing their heads and offering their necks. The Shipspinner’s assistants consist of his highest-ranking officers, spinners, and the faculty at Locke Samoray’s. Evi suppresses an urge to lift her head and fix gazes with her most hated lecturers, the worst professors, the ones who drilled her physical and mental state to the ground and, she only now realizes, fortified her psyche for then and what was to come.

Evidence gives into that curiosity, turns her head up, and looks around to find the Shipspinner Elder nowhere on the stage. She blinks and thinks this is a vanishing act, the man’s attempt at humor, or some cruel joke that the convocation ceremony is a facade, and everyone’s in on it, or that Evi is dreaming, and just a pinch of her neck with no pain returning will tell her she’s right.

She finds her shipspinning peers and sees all of them already have their sashes on, colored to match the five of Bijigress’s shipspinning yards they’ll be assigned to. There is the deep coral-purple of Amethyst, the dirtied ivory of Barite, the bursting sunshine of Citrine, and the sparkling multi-faceted silver that denotes Diamond. It takes moments for Evi to realize that the ocean-deep green sash marking Yard Emerald has not been slung over anyone’s neck. In fact, Evidence is the only one without a sash.

Silk presses soft on her, the weight barely imperceptible as the Emerald sash settles upon Evidence. Percival Traigus, behind her, rests his hands on her shoulders for a moment, and those manicured fingers are as warm as a fire poker applied directly to the skin.

The cadets erupt, shooting to their feet and filling all of Salvarin and the Hells beneath them with their drumming hands, clapping as if for some great beast to rise from the ground or fall from the air. It catches Evi off guard enough to forget about Traigus’s hands, which linger too long before pulling away.

Traigus beckons the shipspinner graduates to stand, and Evi detects that the claps are not symmetrical, not evenly distributed for every graduate bowing before them. A vast concentration, Evi can see, is directed at her.

Yard Emerald, she thinks, while clapping even for herself. Bijigress’s newest shipspinning yard. Full of promise, wealth, recognition, and rapport.

And full of a lot more things.