Iron Seas 03 - Riveted

“We’re all perfectly proper there. Everyone in the New World is rigid and absurdly frightened about the most natural things.”
    Perhaps they were. “Were you one of the abandoned children?”
    “Yes.”
    “From where?”
    “Manhattan City.” Her voice was muffled against her forearms. “Why do you ask?”
    “I’m curious.” He wanted to know everything about her.
    She pushed up onto her elbows, looking back at him with a slight frown. “What does it tell you about me?”
    “It tells me where they found you.” And let him picture her better.
    “But about me ?”
    “Nothing.” But she was irritated, clearly. David was fascinated. He hadn’t expected this reaction. “Why?”
    “I’ve never understood it. That is always the first thing someone asks: Where are you from. Not ‘What do you like?’ or ‘What do you believe?’ or even ‘What is your mother like?’ which all have more bearing on the person I am. And if I don’t tell them where I’m from, they try to guess. Even though there are other people with my color spread all over the New World, they always assume that I’m Liberé—until they hear me speak. They know by my accent that I’m not Black Irish, and not from Manhattan City—though that is partially correct—and not from Lusitania or Castile or the disputed territories. It drives them mad, as if to know me they need to know where I am from.”
    “I’d like to know where you’re from.” He grinned when she snorted. “You only notice it because no one needs to ask in your village. You all grow up knowing each other.”
    “Yes, but what does my coming from Hannasvik tell you? Nothing at all. What have you found out now? That I want you to lick between my legs. But it wouldn’t hold true for everyone from Hannasvik. Some women don’t like to be licked. Some think it should only be discussed privately, and others think such things are better discussed frankly. Some do not want to lie with women, some do not want to lie with men. Some want to leave, some don’t, some dare to leave, some don’t. Some are brave, some are vain, some are pious, and some of us just speak of the gods and know in our hearts that they only exist in Hanna’s stories. Manhattan City is not the reason I love to sew clothes, and neither is Hannasvik. It is not the reason I love smoked fish. It is not the reason for anything about the way I am.”
    He’d have to remember to rile her up more often. God, she was incredible—her color high, her eyes all but sparking.
    “Having smoked fish available in your village might be why you like it,” he pointed out.
    “But that’s not why I love butter candies or maize bread, which I never had before I left Iceland.” She narrowed her gaze at him. “Are you poking at me?”
    “Yes.” And enjoying the hell out of it.
    Her expression softened. “Then tell me why it’s so discomfiting not to know, when a few conversations would tell someone far more about me ? Why is everyone in the New World so obsessed with where everyone else came from?”
    “You’re obsessed with concealing it.”
    “For good reason. What is their good reason? What is it about being born in a certain place that somehow allows people to immediately sum me up? As if I can only believe one thing, support one idea.”
    David had no answer to that. “It’s polite. A quick way to discover common ground. It’s well intentioned.”
    “But ultimately false. Everything they think they know is based on assumptions that will be overturned the longer the acquaintance lasts.”
    Their acquaintance had lasted long enough that he could guess why this roughed her nerves so much. She loved her people and missed her home yet had had to disavow them. The common ground was as false as the assumptions she disliked.
    “And every time someone asks, you’re forced to pretend Hannasvik doesn’t exist again.”
    “Don’t try to be clever.”
    “I can’t help it.”
    “Pfft.” She wrinkled her nose at him. “Everything I said is still true. People always ask, and they think it means something. Don’t tell me you’ve never noticed it?”
    “I suppose I do it all the time,” he said. “I have noticed this: You are irritable after you wake.”
    She grinned suddenly. “My mother called me Annika the SleepingDragon because I was such a danger in the mornings. But I never feel as if I get enough.”
    And she truly hadn’t in the past week, David knew. A heavy shift rotation, without the