Iron Seas 03 - Riveted

man wouldn’t have seen her walking along in a brilliant crimson skirt and canary yellow coat.
    Though the coach was already lost from her sight beyond its dense trail of smoke and steam, she yelled after him, “You rotting rabbitchaser!”
    Pointless, but satisfying—until she sucked in a lungful of the acrid smoke. Coughing, she pounded her fist over her chest, then glanced over her shoulder just in time to avoid the three-wheeled cart that rattled around a horse-drawn wagon and attempted to squeeze between the plodding beast and her leg. Her fierce scowl went unnoticed by the driver.
    Well, hang them all. It was true that the row of shops that separated the north and south roads made narrow corridors of each street, leaving little room to maneuver—but they were headed in the same direction, and the port gates were only a hundred yards away. Was running her down to gain a few seconds truly necessary? Given the manner that some of them handled their vehicles, she suspected they were aiming for her.
    Perhaps they were. Perhaps she’d broken some unspoken Castilian rule that no one aboard Phatéon had thought to warn her about. Perhaps she was unintentionally giving a message: Please crush me to a bleeding pulp alongside this road.
    And now that the thought had entered her mind, it wouldn’tleave. She looked over her shoulder again. No vehicles were bearing down on her…yet.
    Oh, and her mother would have been shaking her head now, telling Annika that her dread was a product of her imagination. That might have been true, once. Growing up, Annika’s tendency to woolgather had been a source of consternation and amusement for the women in the village. Her imagination had continually gotten the best of her—and was precisely why she currently served as second engineer aboard an airship, flying from port to port, rather than eating supper every night in her mother’s cozy earthen home. She’d often fancied dangers that weren’t there and daydreamed when she should have been wary.
    No longer, though. Within a few months of joining Phatéon ’s crew, Annika had discovered that port cities in the New World each came with a unique set of dangers, and she’d learned to be wary until she was familiar with them. Manhattan City’s entry inspectors didn’t just examine the documents proving her origin and certifying that she wasn’t infected by the Horde’s nanoagents. They groped her legs and arms to make certain she wasn’t hiding a mechanical apparatus beneath her clothing—and swinging a fist at an officer who groped too fervently would land her in a cell until her airship’s captain bailed her out. Inside the city, a curse spoken within hearing distance of a constable resulted in a hefty fine; exposing a bare ankle or elbow earned a rebuke and a trip in a paddy wagon back to the port’s gates, where her salacious behavior was reported to Captain Vashon and the airship threatened with docking sanctions.
    In Oyapock, however, Annika could have walked naked down the paved streets without garnering a second look—and given the number of light-fingered war orphans who swarmed visitors entering Liberé’s capital city, it was only by virtue of her trouser buckles that her pants weren’t stolen off her bottom while she wore them. On her first visit to Oyapock, Annika might have considerednudity a blessing, however. The city sat at the mouth of the Orinoco River; accustomed to colder climes, even Annika’s lightest clothing had seemed to suffocate her. But the urchins hadn’t left her nude on that trip—they’d taken her money and her hair instead. She hadn’t felt them lift the purse from her waist. A slight tug at the back of her head had been the only warning before her thick braid had disappeared and her curls sprang into a dark halo. With her hand in her newly shorn hair, she’d stared in openmouthed shock as they’d scampered away. She’d learned, though. Now she kept her hair short and only carried as much money as she needed into Oyapock, leaving the bulk on the airship.
    Annika took her valuables with her in Port-au-Prince. Though a Vashon airship was welcome at any of the French islands in the Caribbean, Phatéon wasn’t exempt from arbitrary searches by the king’s men looking for treasonous nobles or cargo left unaccounted for on the tariff sheets. When Annika had reported her money missing from her berth after a search, Phatéon ’s old goat of a quartermaster had laughed before